‘Prue was too busy to spend time cooking’
Sir Ernest Hall’s love affair with the ‘Great British Bake Off’ judge went up in flames – but the pair are still pals, he tells Claudia Joseph
When Prue Leith appears on the The Great British Bake Off on Christmas Day, she can be sure that at least one person will not be watching: her former lover, Sir Ernest Hall.
Although Sir Ernest, 87, is travelling to Britain from his home in the Canary Islands to spend the festive season with his five children, he has no intention of tuning into the GBBO festive special. He has only watched the Channel 4 programme once and “wasn’t impressed. It’s not my type of programme. I prefer opera.”
Twice-divorced Sir Ernest rarely troubles himself with anything verging on culinary – but neither, he says, did his former partner of four years. “Prue was too busy to spend a lot of time cooking,” he laughs. “She would come back and say: ‘I will make a meal out of what’s in the fridge’.” He has remained friends with the Bake Off judge – who recently drew the nation’s ire after inadvertently revealing the winner of this year’s series on Twitter ahead of the final show being broadcast – despite a less than flattering portrait of him in her recently updated autobiography, Relish.
The pair dated between the death of Leith’s first husband, South African author Rayne Kruger, in 2002 and her second marriage to retired clothes designer John Playfair last year. Having been business colleagues for 20 years prior to their relationship beginning in 2006, they acted at first “like a couple of teenagers”.
However, within four years, their love had turned sour and the highs and lows of their affair were laid bare in excoriating detail in Leith’s tome, which also described how Sir Ernest, an eminent pianist and composer who was knighted in 1998, was taking medication for bipolar disorder.
In his first interview since their break-up – and since Leith replaced Mary Berry on the British institution – he says: “I read Relish when it came out and, to be frank, I can’t remember what the hell it was all about.
“I certainly never regarded her opinion of me as something of importance. It’s just her point of view.” Though his words may sound caustic, he is “very fond of [Leith], my family are very fond of her. She rings me up regularly and I ring her up. I’m delighted for her. The man she has now as her husband is so much more suitable for her than I could have been.”
Sir Ernest overcame a deprived background to achieve phenomenal business and creative success, earning a place at the Royal Manchester College of Music (he taught himself to play the piano at the age of eight), making a fortune in textiles and the Carnaby Street boom during the 1970s, and going on to build a multi-millionpound property empire.
He bought the former Crossley carpet mills at Dean Clough in Halifax in 1983, turning them into a business, design and arts complex. Both the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall visited and still send him Christmas cards; he gets on with the former “incredibly well. I was impressed at the wonderful way he spoke to people. I could tell it was with sincerity and concern.” The pair have since collaborated on the publication of a facsimile edition of Pushkin’s working notebooks; he describes the Prince as “very supportive”.
Sir Ernest has also lunched with the Queen at Buckingham Palace – the date, March 4 1998, remains etched on his memory. He sat on the Monarch’s left-hand side – the Conservative Peer Baron Paul was on her right – and opposite author Joanna Trollope.
“When they served the ginger and pear pudding, I couldn’t eat anything because I was talking to the Queen,” he laughs. “She’s a very easy person to be with. She makes you feel very comfortable.
“Underneath the table in front of her were her two Corgis. When the meal was over she opened a silver case, which had some biscuits in, and fed the dogs.”
When Sir Ernest and Prue got together she was 66, the doyenne of British cookery and founder of Leiths School of Food and Wine, who had been widowed for four years from Kruger. (The couple notoriously had a 13-year affair during Kruger’s marriage to her mother’s best friend, Nan.)
For his part, Sir Ernest was divorced from his first wife June, the mother of his eldest four children, and separated from his second wife Sarah, with whom he has a son, Leopold, 32.
He and Leith enjoyed an idyllic romance in Lanzarote, where he has lived for more than 25 years. They travelled the world, from music festivals in Verbier to five-star hotels in Leith’s native South Africa.
“I was down because my second marriage had fallen apart and I was feeling bereft after retiring, if I am being honest,” he said afterwards. “I felt redundant.
“Prue, then just a good friend, had agreed to come out and cheer me up... I was on the verge of cancelling because I was so low... but then it was like a bolt of lightning from the sky.”
Yet the lovers would soon discover that they were not well matched. Sir Ernest was passionate and volatile, while Leith was more conventional. “She drove me up the wall,” he admitted, though he says he was “surprised by the things she wrote about me” when Relish surfaced.
“You just know there are people who can share your enthusiasm and people for whom your enthusiasm was a bit bewildering and she was in the latter camp. I was too spontaneous for her.”
Nevertheless, buoyed by love in their twilight years, the couple threw a joint party in February 2010 to celebrate their respective 70th and 80th birthdays. “Privately, I thought of it as a kind of celebration of Ernest and I getting together, almost a declaration. I don’t think anything will ever again be as perfect for me as that evening was,” Leith later wrote.
When Leith walked out on Sir Ernest after a blazing row over the Camel House, the concert hall he had set up next door to their Lanzarote home, he was quietly relieved. He had by then decided “she wasn’t the woman for me”, adding that he was “much more devastated when my wife Sarah decided she couldn’t live with me any more. I just couldn’t believe it. I’m still wounded after all these years. She was a million times easier to live with [than Leith].”
Five years ago, Sir Ernest fell in love with Gloria Patricia Ante Tapias, 42, and has discovered he is ideally suited to her Colombian temperament. “I’m much happier now than I have ever been,” he says, laughing merrily. “I have a fantastic relationship with Patricia, which goes from hell to heaven but is never boring.”
The grandfather-of-11 spends his days working in his book-lined study in Lanzarote, sitting in his den, where family photographs jostle for pride of place with his Dali painting, watching music videos on Youtube or Spanish TV and dining in his central courtyard.
Though she and Sir Ernest were not meant to be romantically, Leith has since visited him in Lanzarote with her new husband and he remains “full of admiration” towards her. As Bake Off fans have come to appreciate, “she has an incredible capacity for work”.
Details of the Camel House concerts can be found at thecamelhouse.com