Bake Off's Prue Leith opens up on age gap relationship after falling for husband of mum's best friend

Prue Leith has opened up about a ‘dark secret’ she kept hidden for 13 years, having spoken out about a bombshell from her love life in a new interview.

Leith, 84, is well known for her role as a judge on The Great British Bake Off, which is drawing to a close with the semi-final this evening (19 November) after another eventful series.

Mind you, she almost didn’t return for the 2024 season, having considered quitting the show after seven instalments.

Thankfully, Leith decided to stay - although under one condition, explaining how she felt filming was taking up too much of her summer, and was struggling with the intense schedule.

Recalling how recording usually stretched from April until the end of August with no weekends off, she told The Mirror: "I was in a new house and I hardly saw the garden, I hardly saw my family and I never had a summer holiday."

Leith raised the issue with producers, who agreed to change the filming schedule in order to afford her some more time off.

Prue Leith with current husband, John Playfair (Dave Benett/Getty Images for The National Portrait Gallery)

But while she is being mindful to find ways to make life more enjoyable in her 80s, she recently admitted things weren’t always quite so peachy.

In a new interview with Gyles Brandreth on his Rosebud podcast, the Bake Off star said there was a particularly ‘grim’ part of her life, having fallen for a married man 20 years her senior.

In fact, he was married to her mum’s best friend.

Before her current relationship with second husband John Playfair, Leith was in a relationship with author and property developer Rayne Kruger.

The pair had tied the knot in 1974, later welcoming two children - son Danny and adopted daughter Li-Da - and stayed together until his death in 2002.

Leith admitted: "I mean, this is the grim part of my life. Rayne was married to my mother's best friend and she was so wonderful to me. She had been so helpful to me and we lived with them."

Leith in 1985 (Mervyn George Bishop/Fairfax Media via Getty Images)

Their intertwined lives saw them cohabiting in England from time to time, all living in the same house as Kruger and his first wife Nan Munro, their three children and her mum and dad.

“Rayne was 20 years older than me, but he was 20 years younger than his wife,” she said, adding: "He had married her after the war when her husband had been killed and she had three tiny children, so he had brought up three of her children."

Leith said she felt guilty at the time, having kept the affair a secret for 13 years.

Mentioning that she’d discussed the topic in her autobiography, she added: "You can either keep these things a dark secret all your life, but if you're going to write an autobiography, and I wanted to write a memoir, if you're going to write it, you've got to write the truth, and you've got to write the interesting things."