BY THE time Prue Leith moved from London to West Oxfordshire 35 years ago, she could have been forgiven for kicking back and taking it easy.

After all, she had already built a highly profitable catering business, opened her own restaurant, for which she netted a Michelin star, and established Leith’s School of Food and Wine.

Then there were the best-selling cookery books, including Leith’s Cookery Bible, plus regular columns for national newspapers including the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Mirror and The Guardian.

Throw into the mix a couple of young children and a Cotswold manor house with a five-acre garden to tame and you might have thought she had enough on her plate.

Instead, after setting up home at Chastleton Glebe, near Chipping Norton, she powered ahead with her business empire, reinvented herself as a novelist and was awarded an OBE along the way.

Now 73 and a regular on our television screens as one of the judges on BBC2’s hit series Great British Menu, she has absolutely no intention of slowing down.

“I like the attention, because you know, I am a real egotist,” she says. “People say ‘you must have the best job on TV’ and I think they are right.”

As part of Great British Menu’s format, 24 of Britain’s most talented chefs are challenged to a cook-off each week. Prue and fellow judges, restaurant critic Matthew Fort and restaurateur Oliver Peyton, have the delicious job of tasting and rating everything.

The programme, which launched in 2006, is now into its eighth series. But although Prue has been there from the start, she seems to take the relentless schedule of filming in her stride.

“A car comes and fetches you, then someone does your hair and face and then you are taken home again afterwards.

“I don’t have to do any preparation, just arrive, sit down and the best chefs in the country cook for me.

“Wonderful things arrive on a plate and I just eat and say what I think.”

She says the current series, which has a Comic Relief theme, has been the best so far, thanks to comedian guest judges such as Vic Reeves, Charlie Higson and Tim Brooke Taylor.

“This series has been terrific fun because every week we’ve had a different comic as a judge, so it makes a different dynamic.

“We thought they would come in, make jokes and be funny the whole time but they turned out to be fantastic foodies.

“Charlie Higson really knew his stuff and was saying ‘that’s turmeric, that’s fennel’, while he was tasting and he was almost always right.

“Every now and again, me, Matthew or Oliver think we will stop doing the programme, because we have too much other stuff going on, but then the other two put huge pressure on whoever it is to stay, as we get along so well we don’t want to break up the party.”

In between finding time to spend time with her son Daniel and adopted Cambodia-born daughter Li-Da and two grandchildren, she sits on the board of Orient Express Hotels.

The day I spoke to her, she was about to jet off to Brazil as part of her work for the company. There was a time when she was on the board of major companies including British Rail, the Halifax and Whitbread.

Last year, she was on an all-female panel at Coutts Banks, debating whether FTSE 100 companies should be forced to have more women on their boards. Now, though, she is happy to limit her commercial activities to Orient Express.

She said: “They keep me incredibly busy. It’s a very small board but lovely to be on, as you are always off to far-flung places and can tack on a few days’ holiday on the end.”

As a native South African who came to the UK via Paris, where she learned to love good food and wine, she knows all about travelling, but regards Oxfordshire as her home.

So is she part of the Chipping Norton set? She snorts, before hooting with laughter: “I was there before any of that lot came. My son was at university in Oxford and my daughter went to two schools there.”

Although she goes on to add that she does know Prime Minister and Witney MP David Cameron and he has been to her house, thanks to his link with her son, who was once Mr Cameron’s adviser and speechwriter.

Readers of her novels will know that Oxfordshire landmarks loom large in the stories and she is set to appear at the Chipping Norton Literary Festival later this month to talk about her frank autobiography Relish: My Life On A Plate.

In it, she talks about her passionate relationship with her late husband Rayne Kruger, who died in 2002.

Although she says she takes her laptop with her everywhere to keep the words flowing, Chastleton is her favourite place to write and she is planning a trilogy of novels about restaurants and family feuds.

“It will have my usual mix of love and food,” she explains and that seems a perfect way to sum up this amazing woman’s life so far.