Cookery writer Prue Leith tipped to replace Mary Berry reveals she was a secret mistress

Yesterday Leith said: “I can wish, I can dream. I’ve had two auditions and lots of meetings. I think I’m close but I know there’s one other person in the running. Of course I’d love to do it. I’ve known Mary for years and she loved it.”

She is being talked about as a “like for like” replacement and it is true that Leith, already a judge on BBC2’s Great British Menu, is much the same age Berry was when Bake Off was launched on the Beeb in 2010 (she’s 76, Berry was 75) – but there the similarities end.

Berry, who has been married to the same man for more than half a century, sometimes gives the impression that while butter may melt in her frying pans it would not melt in her mouth. Leith, on the other hand, calls a spade a shovel.

Her brother christened her Mersey Mouth – after the famously capacious Mersey Tunnel – when she broadcast the intimate details of her personal life in her 2012 autobiography. Her son then bought her a megaphone which he delivered with a note that read: “If there’s anyone left in this country who doesn’t know about your love life, perhaps this will help.”

And what a life it turned out to be. When her long-term (married) lover refused to leave his wife and give her a baby in the mid-1970s Leith ran off to South Africa with a man who worked at her restaurant. This did the trick: her commitment-phobic suitor got divorced and the couple went on to bring up two children together.

When husband number one died she took up with a concert pianist who unbeknownst to her suffered from bipolar disorder – but he had to go when his periodic rages became increasingly unpleasant. She met her current husband, a retired fashion designer eight years her junior, a few years ago and they got married last October.

When Leith wasn’t negotiating the simmering tensions of her tangled love life she built up a cookery empire that had a turnover of £15million when she sold it in 1993 – £28million in today’s money – and has found the time to write a string of cookery books and seven novels.

Leith was named the Veuve Clicquot business woman of the year in 1990, has sat on the boards of at least seven blue-chip companies, including British Rail and the Halifax, and added a CBE to her OBE in 2010. Her record is all the more impressive for having been achieved at a time when professional kitchens were very much a male-dominated domain.

Leith once recalled what happened in 1975 when she attempted to place one of the graduates of her eponymous cookery school in the kitchen of the Savoy, then run by a formidable head chef called Silvino Trompetto. He refused to take Leith’s protégée and when she asked why Trompetto boomed: “Because, dear lady, at a certain time of the month, women cause the mayonnaise to curdle.”

Leith, who turns 77 on Saturday, was born and brought up in South Africa. She first became seriously interested in food as an au pair in France when she was astonished to see her employer going to one shop for croissants and another for bread. After studying at the Cordon Bleu cookery school she set up her own catering business.

The 20-year-old chef would prepare food at her bedsit in Barons Court, west London, transport it across town and serve up highquality business lunches to City firms. When one client found a sink plug in his salad Leith quipped: “At least the plug proves I washed the lettuce.” She went on to open a Michelin-starred restaurant in Notting Hill with the help of her lover, a South African writer called Rayne Kruger.

He was the much younger second husband of her mother’s best friend. At the age of 34, 13 years after their affair had got under way, Leith’s biological clock kicked in. Within a year of her marriage to Rayne she had a son Danny, who went on to become a speechwriter for David Cameron. The couple later adopted a Cambodian orphan called Li-Da.

Rayne died in 2002 at the age of 80 when Leith was 62 and she had very fixed ideas about her next companion. “I wanted a man in his 70s so he’d think I was really young; Jewish because in my experience Jewish people love food, music and the arts and don’t give a toss for sport; a musician because I knew nothing about music and needed a tutor; and gay because I’m finished with all that.”

In 2009 she went on holiday with a friend and met septuagenarian pianist Sir Ernest Hall. He was not gay and only one eighth Jewish but they fell in love all the same. That relationship did not work out and shortly afterwards she met her current husband John Playfair at a drinks party.

It remains to be seen whether a double-act with Bake Off’s smooth-talking heartthrob Paul Hollywood could be another match made in heaven.