Prue Leith nearly finished

The speaker discusses various topics including politics, apartheid, relationships, money, and aging. They talk about their mother's activism against apartheid, their own political engagement, and their experiences with relationships and adultery. They also mention their views on money and their belief in the goodness of human beings. They express contentment with getting older and their focus on living life to the fullest. Religion, money, sex and politics. Well, what could be more interesting than that? Those are all the things that I was not allowed to talk about as a child. You weren't allowed to talk about politics, and you weren't allowed to talk about food either. They were considered rather vulgar. And they are the most interesting thing. My mother was an actor, my father was in business. It was a very literate and civilized house. But it was quite puritan, Scottish puritan I think. It would be good to start with politics, because I know that your mum was very politically active, is that right? No, my mama was not politically active in the sense that she belonged to a political party or campaigned or anything. But what she did do with a group of other women, white women, because of course there would be no black members allowed, because the whole thing about apartheid was black and white people were not allowed to mix. But she and another bunch of liberal minded women set up a thing called the black sash. And they would wear a black sash on their clothes and they would go and stand on the town hall steps and protest about apartheid and have eggs thrown at them. I remember her coming home with egg yolk all over her black jacket. And her main area of objection was that being an actress and an impresario and producer, she was really frustrated that she wasn't allowed to have mixed audiences. And the apartheid rules allowed black people to attend a play, but they would have to be an all black audience. Well, since black people were not educated, by and large, over the age of ten, because the regime wanted a class of workers, not intelligentsia, they would not have been the audience that would be likely to want to go to Shaw or Shakespeare or all the great British playwrights, who, of course, were what my mother was concerned with. So she would never have got more than ten black people in a black audience, which would have been uneconomic for everybody. So she wanted black people to be allowed to come to the audience, to the theatre. And also, she couldn't cast a cellist with a black man. She had to have a white man blacked up. And there were some fantastically good black actors, who either left South Africa and went off and came, or they had to wait until the ANC got into power and they were allowed to, and apartheid was abolished. And was the cause something then that you were infused with yourself? Not really. No, I was a typical South African young woman. You know, I knew my parents were very liberal. We had black servants, and I was absolutely devoted to my nanny, and we had really good, friendly relations, but they were still employer-servant relations. You know, I never went to their houses, and they had rooms at the back of our house, in a sort of little compound for the servants. And they were respectable living horses. And I suppose by the impoverished standards of most black people, they were luxuries. But they were certainly nothing like as nice as I was. And that never seemed to me odd. I never questioned, when I was young, when I was a child, I never questioned the fact that my nanny had to sit at the back of the bus, and I had to walk at the front of the bus. Or that, you know, if I walked along the pavement with a lot of giggling school servants, a venerable black man would get off the pavement, walk in the cutter, and let us pass. You know, all these things only hit me when I had been abroad and went back, and realised what kind of a society I'd lived in perfectly happily. You have become, I believe, very politically engaged. You've thrown yourself actively into the debate about education, food in schools, assisted dying. You're very engaged politically, is that fair to say? Yes, I am, but not party politically, interestingly. I mean, I voted for all the spectrums of the political rainbow in my time. Mostly I voted in my long life for the woolly middle, woolly liberal middle, you know, SDP and liberals and so on, all of whom have achieved absolutely nothing and are disappearing so fast they might as well not exist. I've never been party political very much. Of course, I have a Tory MP son, so people always assume that I'm Tory, and I have this posh voice, and I live in the Cotswolds, and a lot of my friends definitely are Tory. So I can see why I'm just assumed to be Tory. This Tory bitch is what Twitter call me quite often. The reason I think you think up of me as political is because, it's not so much political as that I'm a kind of interfering, one of those interfering women who always wants to fix things. When I would be walking down the streets with my children when they were little, if I saw a plastic bag blowing on the pavement, you know, I'd go and pick it up. I once heard the wife of the chairman of British Rail, being asked what she felt when she went into a train lavatory and it was dirty, and they were repainting everything. What do you feel, Lady Parker, they said. What do you do? And she said, well, I clean it up, of course. And I recognise myself in them. I mean, I'm forever tidying up train lavatories. It's that thing of seeing a gap and thinking, that could be fixed. I know how to fix that. Well, if I knew how to fix that, I wouldn't fix it. Or at least try. And so I think I was, you know, at one point in my life I was chairman of the Royal Society of Arts, the RSA. And I don't know if you know much about the RSA, but it is my model organisation, because it's a sort of think and do tank. Yes, it's a think tank, it has lots of clever people writing clever reports, but the idea is never to write a report which will gather dust on the shelf. It's to write a report that can start a little revolution, that can fix a problem. And so, in its time, the RSA has done all sorts of things. It's been the founder, one of the founders of all sorts of organisations, like the London School of Economics, the National Trust, the Lifeboat Association, and all of these things would have been, because members of the RSA thought, there's a problem, people are drowning a tree, we need to do something about it. There's a problem here, we are destroying our heritage, we've got to set up a National Trust. And I have much of that spirit in me, that if you think something's wrong, you should try and help us fix it. And I love being chair of the RSA, simply because of that, we did lots of things. We started, for example, a scheme to teach children to cook at school, and we got it funded by Waitrose, and it ended up a really successful charity, driving buses all round London, and all round the country, which turned into teaching kitchens, and we taught not just the children, but the teachers, most teachers couldn't cook. And that was called Focus on Food, and I was really proud of that. And that just came out of asking our members, what's wrong? I gave a lecture about food, and then a whole lot of people came round and said, well, let's do something about it. It's wonderful, your proactive spirit. Not everybody has it. Well, I think I'm very energetic. I think a lot of people don't do stuff, although they'd like to, but they just don't have the energy. And I have too much energy, which is very tiring for everybody around me. And my children sometimes say, Mum, you are so smiling. So I can see that's not all a good thing. But, yeah, I do have a lot of energy, and of course I enjoy it. And I'm a tremendous egotist anyway, so I like to be the one that gets in there and stirs the pot. I cried reading the letter that your dad wrote to your mum. Remember what letter? Before his operation for a cancer that eventually killed him. But I did wonder what your view of sex and relationships was growing up. If you were the child of a love story, which you obviously were. I obviously was. And I do remember my father saying to me that, it was very interesting, because he said that he was of that generation that believed that if women had sex before marriage, they were trapped and nobody would ever have any respect for them ever again. And if you slept with a man, he would leave you the next morning and he would have no respect for you. And I truly believed that. And so that made me feel incredibly guilty, as of course I obey any of their rules, but I always felt that I was a child. And I knew that they, I mean it really was, I never ever heard my parents quarrel. Presumably they must have. But I never heard them quarrel. And so I did grow up with this, you know. And it's interesting because I always knew that their relationship, that they were more important to each other than we were. We were a little band, my two brothers and me. And we were definitely the bitch-fast players in this family. I mean, we all adored my parents. But their love for each other was definitely, still felt. We didn't feel neglected, ever. We felt very loved. We knew that that was the central thing for both of them. A lot of them had the same. It was really good. And what's quite funny is when I read my mother's diary, thinking of my father giving me this lecture about, you know, women who made love to two men who were married to tramps. I read my mother's diary and she had had an affair before she met mine. And that really shocked me. I couldn't believe it. But my mother had never said this to me, but my father had said this to me. You were quite sexually enthusiastic from quite a young age. I was, I was. I mean, as soon as I got over horses, I was into boys, you know. About 15, I was. I remember thinking, if I have ten mothers before I'm married, that is absolutely the limit. If you have more than ten, you're just as followed. But ten was okay. Ten was okay. I think I had eleven. Indian. I know you've spoken about it before, but you had a long adulterous relationship with the man you ended up marrying. How do you view your adultery now? Well, the interesting thing is I still don't think it's the right thing to do. I don't approve of adultery. I feel really upset when my girlfriend's husband cheat on me. Or I hear of somebody who's having an affair with somebody else. I just think, oh, it's so unfair. But the fact is, and it's such an old age excuse, and it sounds like such a well-worn cliché, but I could no more have not fallen in love with Ray. I mean, I would never have had the willpower to resist such an overpowering love. And it was extraordinary. You know, I'd have done anything for him. And I was right. You know, both of us. It was the most important thing of our lives. And yes, it was particularly painful because Ray's wife was my mother's best friend. She was twenty years older than him, and she had married him when he was twenty-four. I think he was just twenty-four, and she'd just turned forty-one or forty-two. So she was, I suppose, eighteen or twenty years older than him. And he was the same age, older than me. So his first wife was twenty years younger than him, and his second wife was twenty years younger than him. But most painfully, she was like a mum to me. When I came to work in England, I stayed with them, with Ray and his wife Nan. And Nan was absolutely wonderful. She was... She could not have been kinder. And so I was like a... I mean, the betrayal and the... and the deceit and all this. It seems to be amazing that I could do it. But I so loved Ray, and I so actually loved Nan. And the one thing we were both totally agreed on was that we weren't going to get married, and that he would not leave Nan. And I didn't want him to leave Nan. I didn't want to upset that family. My best friend was his daughter. It's all a bit too incestuous and difficult to explain, but I never once asked him to leave Nan. And in fact, in the end, I left him, because when I turned thirty-four, the desire to have a baby hit me like a tidal wave. I mean, I had always been saying to myself, I don't want children, I'm very happy, and I've got Ray, and it's perfect. I'm building up my business. It's actually fine that we're not together all the time, because I'm working really hard, and it means that he's not hurting Nan. Fortunately, the war came unravelled, because when I was thirty-four, I suddenly realised that I wanted to have a baby more than anything. So I left him. I left Ray. It didn't work. I ran away with somebody I thought the easiest way to get away from Ray would be to get in trouble with somebody else. And so I did. Anyhow, this didn't work, because he'd run away from his wife, I'd run away from Ray, and neither of us were happy, and we both wanted to go back to where we were. But of course it was still hugely hurtful for Nan, absolutely awful for Nan. But both of them were wonderful people, and they decided that they were not going to let this catastrophe, from their point of view, absolutely wonderful for mine, of him leaving Nan and marrying me, they were not going to let it ruin everything. And so Nan just said to her children, we're all going to behave properly, nobody's going to fall out. Rain is still rain, through, through, through. By then we had our house in the country, and after a while we had our house in the country. And Nan used to come down many weekends and stay with us and have Christmas with us, and be still with us and see the family all the time. Ten years after Ray died, which must have been beyond devastating, he died in 2002 I think? I did. And ten years after that you remarried, you married your current husband John. Yes. And what I'd love to know from you is how, at its best, does a good marriage look? Well, I absolutely, I mean, John could not be more different from Ray. John is very sensible and gregarious, and so unlike Ray in the sense that Ray never liked, never, you know, he was practically reclusive. And John has been, I mean, he has saved my life really, because I don't think, I think I need somebody to like. You know, I'm doing this one woman show at the moment, and we have questions afterwards, at the end of it. And one of the questions, inevitably, is about falling in love at 17. You fell in love at 17. How does that feel? Well, to be honest, it feels exactly like falling in love at 17. You know, you have the same heartbanging and concern that, you know, can I ring him up? You know, dare I text him? Does he really fancy me? Am I imagining it? You know, all that stuff at the beginning. Nothing changes, just because you're old. So, I'm a great advocate for geriatric love, I think it would be, how do I view the value of money? Well, I think it's naive and ridiculous to think it's not important. I mean, you talk to anybody who has no money, and it dominates their lives. Of course it does. And we don't know where your next meal is coming from. So, true poverty is appalling. I think I've always been so lucky, because I came from a well-to-do South African family. My mother was a successful theater person. My dad was a director of a subsidiary of ICI, which was a huge company at the time. So, we lived in a very nice house, and we went to private school, and we lived in a nice area of Johannesburg. I never went, as a child, into one of the South African appalling townships. So, I had... I just... Although I seriously knew there were lots of poor people, I'd never seen some... It's extraordinary how you can live in a country and not be aware. Anyway. So, yeah. No, I don't know what you want to tell me about money. Obviously money is important. I don't think I would ever do that. I've had the luxury, because I've always had... My parents helped me in the beginning. I was given help when I... My mother helped me when I opened my restaurant. She put £11,000 into my restaurant. And when I first started my business, I had an allowance from my parents, £10,000 a week or something, which today would probably be £1,000 a week. Or £5,000 a week. So, I always had help. And... But I've always been quite careful with money. I've never lived above my income. And I've been, luckily, successful with my business. I've always managed to live within my income, but now I have huge income. And has your career choices been motivated by money? I mean, do you choose with your heart, and then money's a by-product? I love business. I absolutely enjoy it. I'm a real trader. The reason I have a glasses range and a necklace range is because I actually love trade. I love making stuff, and I love designing things, and I love people buying them. You know, it just gives me huge pleasure. But the business... I've always been saying to students, don't be scornful of profit. You know, I went to talk to a lot of art students at Goldsmith College one year ago, and I met this wall of people saying, art for art's sake. And I was saying that I thought the college had teached them marketing skills, that it's no good being the best silversmith or the best painter or the best sculptor in the world if nobody's going to buy your work. The only way you can go on making beautiful artwork is by selling some of it and selling how important money is. And I've never taken a job just because money's good. However, I don't think I would have done, let's say, Baycom, if I was supposed to do it for free. And you know what? I am so grateful to it, because there's an awful lot of the things that I can do now. I wouldn't have ever got a one-woman show off the ground, would I, if it wasn't for Baycom? Because every single one of those people who buy tickets to see me come because of Baycom. I mean, they like me. They come because they like me, and they like me because they like Baycom. I do think that happiness makes a huge difference to one's energy levels. And John is really encouraging. He's always up for anything. And that's just extraordinary. I mean, he's come with me. He's done 33 of these one-woman shows, and he's come to every one. He often sits at the back and reads me a Kindle. But he's always there. He calls himself my bag carrier, but his job wasn't just a bag carrier. I mean, I wouldn't do it if it wasn't for him, because it wouldn't be any fun. It wouldn't be so much fun. It would be quite a bit of fun. But I don't think I would have done it if he wasn't coming with me. But that's the truth, I think. I'm really lucky with that. You don't believe in God. I think it's a wonderful theory, too. If I have a religion at all, it's that I really believe in the inner kindness and goodness of human beings, and that I don't think that Christians or Buddhists or Muslims have some kind of monopoly on goodness or on rarity. There are lots of very good people who don't believe in God. Jesus doesn't have some kind of monopoly on goodness. Does your goodness, because you are obviously a very good person and you're very caring and you do an awful lot for other people, does it... Has fame made any difference to that? Do you have to concentrate on staying well-behaved? I don't think I've ever changed. Essentially, the people often say, if they like me on the television or they like me on my one-woman show or they like what I write, they will often say, you are so consistent. You're always just you. And I think I don't know how to be anything else than just me. And I do realise that sometimes that's irritating. A bit too talkative, a bit too bossy, a bit too cavalier. But I don't know what comes from it. I think that you cannot be happy if you... Because I think that happiness is the ultimate goal. I don't think you can be happy if what you are enjoying is at the expense of somebody else. If you... If you get your kicks from being brown and... you know, devilish and behaving badly to other people so that you feel special, that can't make you happy. That's... That's a kind of hell that is totally unacceptable. I mean, everybody wants to be loved and... nobody loves a bleak, frankly. You've said before that your main concern is not having enough life left to live. Do you mind getting older? No, I don't actually mind getting older. I mean, I'm having a great old age. You know, I'm fairly healthy and... But I would like longer because I still would like to do a lot more things. But I don't want to live. I don't want to... Well, you know, I feel about euthanasia. I don't want to live. It would seem an awful pity to have such a lovely life as I have. Almost everything has gone right for me. Almost everything. And then have to spend weeks or months or years in pain and suffering. I'd rather end it. Although I'd love to live for a very long time, I don't want to live in sickness with it. I don't think life itself is that precious, you know. You can go on and on about the safety of your life. I just think safety's a sin. Do you think you'll... Do you think assisted... Do you think assisted dying will become... Law. Law. Yes. I do. I don't know whether it will become law in my lifetime. But I think it definitely will. Because you just look at the trends at the moment. You know, Jersey, Scotland, France, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, all getting assisted dying. And, you know, most of the British public want it. And, I think that, yes, there are... You know, I do get the arguments against, which are mostly practical about how can you make sure that it's not abused, that you don't get hospitals using it as a way to clear the old people out so that they can spend more time and give the beds to the more deserving people, younger people. But I think that's a matter of getting the safeguards right. And I think we should be examining what goes on in all the countries. And there are many, many jurisdictions where this is legal. We should look at all of them very carefully and make sure that we make the law as good as we can. It will never be watertight. There will always be somebody who will manage to abuse it in some way. But I think the danger is exaggerated. And I think the number of people who die absolute and miserable deaths in hospitals at the moment is a disgrace. And palliative care is great. And, of course, we should do nothing about it. But the interesting thing is where assisted dying has been legalised, palliative care has generally been better funded. Because the whole emphasis on end of life becomes more front of stage. I met a GP at a wedding a few years ago. I was sitting next to him and he had retired early. And I said, why? And he said, because of this is probably not for the air. He said, because of the fucking Macmillan nurses. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, they won't let me do the one thing that I could do, which was you know, send people on their way quickly and easily. And now it's also policed and monitored that he couldn't do it anymore. I'm talking to a couple of Macmillan nurses when my older brother was dying of cancer. He had bone cancer. It was incredibly painful. And all the family was begging him for cancer just after morphine did it. And they said, if you realise how often we are asked that every day, we are asked that all the time. And he said, you're not allowed to, you can't. This is really difficult. But I think the nurses you really need to worry about are the pro-life lobby. In most big hospitals there will be a group of pro-life nurses and they really believe that doctors should not do anything to carry on death. Even if it's absolutely inevitable. The person is in agony. Curious subject. Last question, Prue. At the end of the day, what really matters in this life? Love. Love. And it doesn't have to be love of your husband or love of your children. But you have to love something. It could be I don't know, rare orchids or your spaniel. You must have something to use that wonderful thing which is If you really love something or someone it makes you happier and makes everybody around you happier. I think that's a cliché thing to say but I'm sure that's right. I'm sure you're right. Thank you so much for your time. Well, thank you. You've been so brilliant. Honestly, you're a real hero of mine. Really? Yeah, you are. Because I think well, I've never been aware I was aware of leaves when I was younger but aware of you since you've been I suppose older and I think that old age is surely a decision and I love that you decide to keep on living to keep on living with such spirit. You're just brilliant. I'm just very lucky that I'm allowed to go on living with such spirit and I I'm lucky that I've had the opportunity to do all the things that makes my old age interesting and fun. I like writing and I've written a lot of books and I like cooking so I do a lot of that book books you know, I have lots of outlets for the energy. Is it as fun as it looks doing the Bake Off? It is and it's you know what the Bake Off is exactly what you see which is that it's incredibly kind show it's encouraging I've never heard in seven years I've never heard anybody quarrel and shout at anybody it's just so nice. Some of those cameramen have been there since the beginning. Yeah and you know I think part of us because they're boring taking long shots of the tent and pictures of them but they love it because you know it's a everybody knows each other and it's very welcoming people walk into the tent and they don't feel that they're going into some exclusive club that they don't belong to they immediately feel part of it it has an effect on people and what's been very interesting is that I now I now judge the American one as well because of the way that Americans think about it and I thought that the American contestants would be like American contestants are on a lot of American game shows where they're winning a huge amount of money and they really they are you know they undermine their fellow competitors they they guide the camera they try to hog the limelight and they behave very morbidly over the top manner and I said oh my god these American kids well of course that doesn't happen because they all watch Great British Bake Off they're all in love with Great British Bake Off and they behave exactly as the tent expects them to we all behave better as soon as we get into a marquee we behave better yes exactly exactly and then worse I've got a huge crush on Noel Fielding as well who I just think is amazing isn't he lovely just lovely I love him there's somebody new coming this is not but this is Alison Hammond that's it that's it she'll be great too because she's full of joy yes she is and I've never met her except I think she came on Bake Off once but I wasn't I wasn't a judge then but I've seen her on this morning and she seems great and everybody loves her I've not met anybody who hasn't been that is a fantastic choice you must get do you get exhausted by everything no you like being busy because you must be I mean you're so busy yes of course I get exhausted but my great thing is a trip which I learnt in lockdown is to have a trip in the afternoon don't you feel mad when you wake up though no not at all I feel a lot better after having had a kiss yeah I go into a terribly deep sleep and then wake up sort of feeling awful but I haven't really tried lately maybe I'll try what time do you have it usually about well if it's any luck I like to go upstairs about 3.30 read for perhaps three quarters of an hour or something and then fall asleep and wake up half past five and I'll have an hour to put up lovely do you read do you read fiction I need everything at the moment I've got about five books on the go the most important one is called Craveness by Henry Dividley oh yes yes I've heard about that basically a rehash of his report that he did to Michael Doe on Zoom yeah really brilliant and his so he's turned it into a polemic for the public very very good good for him terrific and so that's good and then I'm reading a book called Words of Pain by a woman called Jacoby and it's a diary of dying she's and it's a really lovely book and it's letters to her doctor in her last years of life it's only thirty four when she died but she's an amazing woman and she by the way is not at all the her doctor was very angry so it was a good debate going on and then I'm reading a book called I've just got a novel by Alan Titchmarsh ah I read one of his novels the other day it was called The Life of Jesus I think it's his first novel and it was really good yeah but I hadn't and then I went on his programme last week and it was called The Gift it's about somebody who has almost basically psychic sickness I've never read it but I think it's a really good book isn't it um what else I can't remember what else I'm trying to read but I'm reading um Leonard Bernstein um of liberty on liberty yeah heavy heavy philosophy and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and