Prue Leith final

The speaker discusses various topics including her childhood restrictions on discussing religion, money, sex, and politics. She talks about her mother's involvement in the anti-apartheid movement and her own political engagement. She also touches on her views on sex and relationships, her long adulterous relationship, and her current marriage. The speaker discusses the importance of money and her career choices. She talks about her belief in the kindness and goodness of human beings and the importance of happiness. She doesn't mind getting older but worries about not having enough time left to live. 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 anything. 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 actress. My father was in business. You know, it was a very literate and civilized house. But the quiet purity, Scottish purity, my thing. 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 toes 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. But 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. They either left South Africa and went off and became famous, 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 some really good, friendly relations, but they were still employer-servant relations. You know, I never went to their houses. You know, they had rooms at the back of our house, you know, with little compounds and servants. And they were respectable living forces. And I suppose by the impoverished standards of most black people, they were luxurious. But they were certainly nothing like as nice as us. And that never seemed to me odd. I never questioned, when I was young, when I was a child, I never questioned how my nanny had to sit at the back of the bus and I had to sit at the front of the bus. Or that, you know, if I walked along the pavement with a lot of giggling school friends, a venerable black man would get off the pavement, walk in the gutter, 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've voted in my long life for the woolly middle and 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. And the reason I think you think 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 street 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 it was replaced with a new one. 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 know how to fix that, I would 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 genesis, I think, of what I said, that the founders, one of the founders of all sorts of organisations, like the London School of Economics, the National Trust, the Rice Boat Association, and all of these things would have been because members of the RSA thought, there's a problem, people are drowning, 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 chairman 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, which turned into, and all round the country, which turned into teaching kitchens. And we taught not just the children, but the teachers. 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 tiring. 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. 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. It was a wonderful 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 it. And so that made me feel incredibly guilty, as of course I didn't obey any of their rules, but I always felt that I was a tramp. 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 bitter past players in this family. I mean, we all had fooled my parents. But their love for each other was definitely, it still felt, we didn't feel neglected, ever. We felt very loved. We knew that that was the central thing for both of them. Without them ever saying it. It was really good. And what was quite funny is when I read my mother's diaries, 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 diaries. And she had had an affair before she met mine. And that really shocked me. I couldn't believe it. Because, you know, 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 10 lovers before I marry, that is absolutely the minimum. If you have more than 10, you're just as full of it. But 10 was okay. 10 was okay. I think I had 11. In the end. 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, you know, it's such an old age excuse. And, you know, it sounds like such a well-worn cliche. But I could no more have not fallen in love with James. I mean, I would never have had the willpower to resist such an overpowering love. And it was extraordinary. And, you know, I'd have done anything for him. And I was right. 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 Ben's wife was my mother's best friend. She was 20 years older than him. And she had married him when he was 24. I think he was just 24. And she just turned 41 or 42. So she was, I suppose, 18 or 20 years older than him. And he was the same age, older than me. So his first wife was 20 years older than him, and his second wife was 20 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. That family was his daughter. It was 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 34, 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, you know, I'm working really hard. And it means that he's not hurting Nan. But, you know, the war came unraveled, because when I was 34, I suddenly realised that I wanted to have a baby more than anything. So 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 himself 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. 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 her. But both of them were wonderful people, and they just decided that they were not going to let this capacity, from their point of view, which is absolutely wondrous 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 is going to fall out. Rain is to rain, through is to through. By then we had our house in the country. And after a while we had our house in Cardiff. And Nan used to come down many weekends and stay with us and have Christmas with us and eat with us and see the family all the time. Ten years after Rain 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 Rain. John is very sensible and gregarious and so unlike Rain, Rain 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 love. You know, I'm doing this one-woman show at the moment. And we have questions after the interview. 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 really love? 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 a very active love, I think it should 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 life, 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 theatrical person. My dad was the director of the 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. Although I theoretically knew there were lots of poor people, I'd never seen slums. It's extraordinary how you can live in a country and not be aware. So, yeah. No, I don't know what you want me to say 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 for all three of them, which today would probably be £1,000 a week, or £500 more a week. So, I always had help. 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. So, I've always managed to live within my income, but now I have huge income from doing that. And have 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 books I heard of art students that go to college once a year, and I met this wall of people saying, art for art's sake. And I was saying that I thought the college would teach them marketing skills, but 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, selling how important money is. And I've never taken a job just because the money's good. However, I don't think I would have done, let's say, VACOM, if I was supposed to do it for free. And you know what? I am so grateful to it, because 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 VACOM? Because every single one of those people who buy tickets to see me come because of VACOM. I mean, they like me. They come because they like me, and they like me because they like VACOM. I do think that happiness makes a huge difference to one's energy levels. And John is really encouraging me. 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. I mean, he doesn't all. He often sits at the back and reads his Kindle. I fairly expect him to watch the same thing as I've got back. But he's always there, you know. And he calls himself my bag carrier, but he's far more than 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 true, I think. I'm really lucky with that. You don't believe in God. It's just a wonderful theory. If I have a religious soul, it's that I really believe in the 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. It's interesting that people often say if they like me on 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. I'm 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 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 get your kicks from being brown and beaverish and behaving badly to other people so that you feel special, that can't make you happy. That's a kind of hell with totally unsatisfactory. I mean, everybody wants to be loved and nobody loves a beaver, 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. I'm fairly healthy. 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 awful pity to have had 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. At the end of the day, what really matters in this life? Love. Love. And it doesn't have to be, you know, love of your husband or love of your children. But you have to love something. It could be, it could be, oh, I don't know, rare orchids or your spaniel. You must have something to come... 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 love. Or a cliché thing to say, but I'm sure that's right.