Prue Leith on Prince Phillip: 'I don’t think he liked me much'

31 May 2021, 13:06 | Updated: 31 May 2021, 13:09

Chef, broadcaster and novelist Prue Leith has told the Difficult Women podcast what it was really like to work alongside Prince Philip.

Speaking to Rachel Johnson this week on Difficult Women, Prue said that the late Prince Philip could be “really difficult”.

“Occasionally I would have little run-ins with him and I think he didn’t – like many men – he didn’t really understand strong and confident women,” she said.

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“And he didn’t like them.

“So I don’t think he liked me much.”

She recalled an anecdote from a meeting of the Royal Society of Arts in the nineties, when she was the chair and the Prince was the president.

During a conversation about the growing population, Prince Philip declared that the problem was that people were having too many children.

“I found myself completely forgetting who I was talking to,” recalled Prue.

“I said ‘that’s a bit rich, Sir, coming from you’, thinking, well, he had four children… and I thought ‘oh my God, that’ll be off with my head’.

“And he just laughed and said ‘touché’.”

In the podcast, Prue also opened up about assisted dying after watching her brother’s slow demise from bone cancer.

She described his “painful” disease, saying “you can break a rib just by coughing when your bones have cancer”.

“Eighty six percent of the population would like to be able to die when they want to,” she said.

“I think if you’re at the end of your life, you’re dying anyway, the last three weeks can be absolute hell for somebody with bone cancer, or with multiple sclerosis, or motor neurone disease… Grown up people who are of sound mind, out to be able to make that decision for themselves.”