Prue Leith

• 1. Introduction

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  Prue Leith joined The Great British Bake Off in March 2017, taking over as a judge from Mary Berry when the programme moved to Channel 4. It was a high-profile seat to inherit. Yet the newcomer already had a career that few in British food could match. She had been a restaurateur, a cookery writer, a novelist, a broadcaster and a university administrator. She had also run catering for a national railway and sat on the boards of well-known companies. How did one person gather so many roles? And what did a girl from Cape Town have to do with the way Britain eats?

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• 2. Cape Town to Notting Hill

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  Prudence Margaret Leith was born on the 18th of February 1940 in Cape Town, which was then part of Cape Province and is now in the Western Cape. In 1960 she moved to London to study at the Cordon Bleu Cookery School. Soon afterwards she began supplying high-quality business lunches. That small venture grew into Leith's Good Food, a caterer for parties and events. In 1969 she opened Leith's, a restaurant in Notting Hill that earned a Michelin star. She sold it in 1995. In 1975 she had founded Leith's School of Food and Wine, which trains both professional chefs and amateur cooks. By 1993 the group's turnover had reached £15 million. After selling the business, she helped found the Prue Leith College in 1995. It has since been renamed the Prue Leith Chef's Academy. A Prue Leith Culinary Institute followed in South Africa, and a restaurant called Odd Plate was renamed Prue Leith's Restaurant. In 1980 she would be appointed to the board of a national railway.

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• 3. Trains and Boardrooms

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  In 1980 Leith became the first woman appointed to the British Railways Board. Rail catering was much criticised at the time, and she set about improving it. In 1982 the catering division, Travellers Fare, was separated from the hotels business. New outlets were created, including Casey Jones and Upper Crust. Leith left British Rail in September 1985. Her board work did not stop there. She has been a non-executive director of British Transport Hotels, Safeway, Argyll plc, the Leeds Permanent Building Society, Whitbread plc, Woolworths plc and the Halifax. The list also includes Triven VCT, Omega International plc and Belmond Hotels, formerly Orient Express Hotels. She is also a director and investor in several start-up companies. Public bodies drew on her too. She chaired the Restaurateurs Association from 1990 to 1994 and sat on an Investors in People working group. From 1999 to 2003 she was a director of the housing association Places for People. She chaired Forum for the Future from 2000 to 2003. From 2004 to 2005 she belonged to the Consumer Debt Working Group, which contributed to the Conservative Party's 2006 policy document Breakdown Britain. Her chairmanship of the Royal Society of Arts ran from 1995 to 1997. During it she led a successful campaign to fill an empty plinth in Trafalgar Square with changing works by leading contemporary artists. That space is now known as the Fourth Plinth.

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• 4. Cookbooks and Novels

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  Leith's Cookery Bible is the best known of the 12 cookery books she has written. Alongside her business work, she became a food columnist, writing in turn for the Daily Mail, the Sunday Express, The Guardian and the Daily Mirror. Fiction came as a second strand of her writing. She has produced eight novels. They are Leaving Patrick, Sisters, A Lovesome Thing, Choral Society, A Serving of Scandal, The Food of Love: Laura's Story, The Prodigal Daughter and The Lost Son. The last three are linked as the Angelotti Chronicles, also called the Food of Love trilogy. In 2013 she turned to her own life with a memoir titled Relish.

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• 5. Television Years

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  Her first television job in the 1970s was one she did not enjoy. Tyne Tees Television hired her to present two magazine series of 13 episodes each, aimed at women at home. She was a last-minute replacement for Jack de Manio. She had no experience, and the director liked everything scripted, even interviews. In the 1980s the cameras turned on her. She was the subject of the first episode of Channel 4's Take Six Cooks. She also featured in the BBC's The Best of British, a series about young entrepreneurs. In 1999 she served as one of the Commissioners on Channel 4's Poverty Commission. From 2005 to 2016 she judged BBC Two's Great British Menu, eleven years in all. She also judged My Kitchen Rules before moving to Bake Off, where she remained until 2025. In December 2021 she was the castaway on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. In February 2024 her ten-part series Prue Leith's Cotswold Kitchen began on ITV1. A second series followed in 2025, and a third began in early 2026. In 2025 she also took part in the sixth series of The Masked Singer as "Pegasus". She was eliminated in the second episode. In January 2026 she announced in an Instagram post that she was retiring from Bake Off.

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• 6. Teaching Britain to Cook

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  Focus on Food was a charity Leith founded and chaired while she was at the Royal Society of Arts. It promotes cooking in the school curriculum and is now part of the Soil Association. With the charity Training for Life she also started the Hoxton Apprentice. This not-for-profit restaurant spent ten years training young people who had been out of work for a long time and faced the greatest disadvantage. From 2007 to 2010 she chaired the School Food Trust. The government body was largely responsible for improving school meals after Jamie Oliver's television exposé of the poor state of school dinners. The Trust, now the Children's Food Trust, also set up Let's Get Cooking. That organisation runs over 5,000 cooking clubs in state schools, and Leith is its patron. She was a member of the Food Strand of the Esmée Fairbairn foundation until 2015. She is vice-president of The Sustainable Restaurant Association and a trustee of Baby Taste Journey, an education charity concerned with healthy food for infants. She is also patron of The Institute for Food, Brain and Behaviour, Sustain's Campaign for Better Hospital Food, and the Prue Leith Chef's Academy in her native South Africa. Her work in general education was just as busy. She chaired Ashridge Management College from 2002 to 2007. From 1998 to 2006 she chaired 3E's Enterprises, an education company that turned round failing schools and managed academies. From 2000 to 2007 she was Chairman of Governors at Kings College, a secondary school in Guildford. Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh made her its Chancellor. She was installed in July 2017 and held the post until 2024. Thirteen British universities have given her honorary degrees or fellowships.

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• 7. Family and Home

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  Leith holds dual South African and British citizenship. In 1974 she married Rayne Kruger, a property developer and author. They stayed married until his death at the age of 80 in December 2002. The couple had two children. Their daughter, Li-Da Kruger, was adopted from Cambodia and is a filmmaker. Their son, Danny Kruger, was a speechwriter and adviser to David Cameron. He is now the MP for East Wiltshire. He sits for Reform UK, having defected from the Conservative Party on the 15th of September 2025. In October 2016 Leith married John Playfair, a retired clothes designer. At first the two lived apart, each in their own home. They have since built a house together in Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, where they both live. Her brother James Leith, a former restaurateur, is married to the biographer Penny Junor.

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• 8. Convictions and Honours

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  Leith voted for Brexit, and she has said she "dithered and dithered for ages because there were really good arguments on both sides". More recently she has voiced concern about falling food standards. In May 2020 she backed Dominic Cummings and his wife Mary Wakefield over their breach of the COVID-19 lockdown. Her son described the couple as "old friends". Her most personal campaign began with the death of her brother David in 2012. He had worked for the RAF and for Prue Leith's Good Food. He died of bone cancer at the age of 74, in conditions she called "absolute agony". Afterwards she began campaigning to make assisted dying legal in Britain. In 2023 she made a Channel 4 documentary on the subject with her son Danny, who holds the opposite view. She is a patron of Dignity in Dying, and in 2023 she spoke on the issue in Parliament. Official recognition has come steadily. She was made an OBE in 1989. In 1990 she received the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year Award. A CBE followed in the 2010 Birthday Honours. In the 2021 Birthday Honours she became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for services to food, broadcasting and charity.

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