Prue Leith still regrets stealing her mother’s friend’s husband – almost 60 years later.
The ‘Great British Bake Off’ judge had a 13-year love affair with Rayne Kruger while he was married to his wife Anne – a friend of her family – and, although she’s completely against adultery, she can’t help but think fondly about their "fantastic" relationship because they later married and had two children together.
Speaking on ‘This Morning’ on Wednesday (22.11.17), she said: "I’ve only fallen totally in love three times. The first time was with a family friend. He became my husband and we had a 40-year relationship and then he died.
"It was fantastic but the only trouble was he was my mum’s best friend’s husband and a family friend. So it was the most awful thing and the funny thing is, I still think adultery is wrong … I know it was the wrong thing to do but I was 20, he was nearly 40, he was like God to me and I absolutely loved it."
Despite causing hurt, Prue was pleasantly surprised by how supportive her family was and is glad she and Anne managed to build a strong friendship in later years.
She explained: "Actually everyone was really good about it. Anne was his wife. She was a wonderful woman. He married a woman who was 20 years older than him and they had a 25-year marriage and then I came along and I was 20 years younger than him so between me and Anne there was nearly 40 years.
"She was a mother to me, she was lovely, and of course she was deeply unhappy but he was just determined that we would stay friends and the families wouldn’t split. Anne would come and stay at weekends with us and I remember Anne and I went to a garden party together at Buckingham Palace in our posh hats. We were good friends."
After Rayne’s death in 2002, the 77-year-old restaurateur went on to find love again.
She said: "He’s called John Playfair. I refer to him as my toyboy, which is a bit of joke because he’s 71 but he seems very young to me.
"You do all those things like waiting for the phone to ring and thinking: ‘Is this text a bit too forward?’ All that stuff that goes on at the beginning."
The couple got married last year but still live in separate houses because they haven’t had the "energy" to sort through their "clobber" and combine it.
She added: "We still live in separate houses. We wake up together in my house, he then gives me a cup of tea, takes the dogs for the walk and then vanishes for the rest of the day. He goes back to his house. The reason we haven’t amalgamate the houses yet – we will one day – is because you’ve got so much clobber … we haven’t had the energy to amalgamate it. But it works like a treat. He turns up again at 7pm. Sometimes he spends the day gardening for me. At the moment, the reason he’s not here, is he is planting an orchid at the moment so he’s knee-deep in mud."
Prue Leith regrets stealing mother’s friend’s husband
