Prue Leith has opened up about why she decided to write about her 13-year affair with her mother’s best friend’s husband, before Leith eventually married him.
In her 2012 autobiography, the Great British Bake Off judge revealed that while her late husband Rayne Kruger was still married to the late South African actor Nan Munro, they had maintained a secret romantic relationship.
Leith, 83, said she was initially unsure if she should “put everything in” while writing her book Relish.
Speaking on a recent episode of the White Wine Question Time podcast with host Kate Thornton, the TV chef said she decided “the rules should be, if it’s interesting it should go in, if it’s boring it shouldn’t”.
“If there are things in your life you’re not exactly proud of, but they would be interesting to your reader, you should try to tackle them,” she said.
“So I did write about the long affair I had with my husband before we married. I thought, ‘You know, to skip it when Rayne was the most important person in my life… How could I not tell his whole story?’ So I did.”
Kruger, a property developer and author, shared three children with Munro before they separated and he married Leith in 1974. Kruger and Leith went on to have two children of their own, Danny Kruger and adopted daughter Li-Da Kruger, before he died in 2002 at the age of 80.
Leith said she did not ask Kruger to leave Munro while they were having their affair because she was “very happy”.
“I had none of the duties of life and all of the pleasures of somebody who loved me,” she recalled. “I wasn’t pressing for marriage.
“We did have 13 secret years and nobody ever guessed because we were discreet.”
She admitted that their affair was made easier to conduct because Kruger was a family friend and the chairman of her company.
However, they remained careful not to “go out to dinner or anything that would create any kind of suspicion”.
Despite everything that happened between them, Leith told the podcast that Munro forgave them both for the affair, despite being questioned for it by friends.
“I remember one of her really famous actress friends said to her, ‘How can you go and have weekends and stay with Prue and Rayne? That woman, she’s a witch, she stole your husband’,” Leith said.
“And Nan said, ‘Are you going to have me every weekend? Shall I come to you instead?’ She said, ‘They are my friends, I love them. Yes, it’s been hard, but Prue’s still Prue’. She was amazingly forgiving. And an extraordinary woman.”
Last year, the celebrity chef said she did not regret the affair, even though it was “very painful”.
While appearing on her Nothing In Moderation tour, she told an audience in Bath: “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.”
