‘I took valium before serving tea to the queen’

As she embarks on her first stage tour, Prue leith reveals some surprising secrets about her remarkable life, including catering for royals and rock stars

Restaurant owner, chef, caterer, journalist, cookery writer and novelist Dame Prue Leith can add a new job to her long and impressive CV – she is now a stage performer, having embarked at the age of 82 on her first tour, Prue Leith: Nothing In Moderation.

The Great British Bake Off judge started her tour at the Rondo Theatre in Bath last month, amusing the audience with tales of her exploits in London in the 60s and 70s. Surprising revelations included rubbing shoulders with celebrities and royalty, and a party in Paris – where she was studying at the Sorbonne – she’ll never forget.

“A friend said to me, ‘There’s a party going on and I can get us both in,’” she says. “When we went in, there was a sea of bare bums bouncing up and down on bean bags. I was absolutely horrified and too prudish to join in. For an hour I walked around with my clothes on and everyone was like, ‘Get them off!’

“I thought I would be more invisible if I took my clothes off, so I stripped off and walked about pretending I was on the way to the bar or going to the loo.”

Previously, Prue had a rather more innocent upbringing in South Africa, where she attended a girls’ boarding school run by nuns and was more interested in horses than in men, at least for a time.

“When I was young, the thing I wanted to do was teach people how to ride horses. And when I was much younger I wanted to marry a horse! When I told my father, he said, ‘You do realise all your children will be centaurs?’

“But when I was 15 I realised boys were much more exciting than horses,” she continues. “When I got to 17, my father helped me fill in an application form to go to university. It asked for a list of hobbies and he said, ‘I think I will put “Boys” down.’ I was absolutely furious.

“Fifty years later, my husband said the same thing about our daughter and she came back and said, ‘Dad, all I think about is sex and shopping.’ I was not brave enough to say that.”

Prue talks honestly about her personal life during her stage tour, chatting frankly about her first marriage to property developer Rayne Kruger, who was married when they met.

“I had an affair for 13 years with the man who became my husband, and he was someone else’s at the time. I can’t pretend it was right. I never regretted it as I loved him and he loved me. It all ended well, but it was very painful for a while.”

Sadly, Rayne – with whom Prue had son Danny and adopted daughter Li-da – died in 2002 at the age of 80, but Prue found love again, marrying