“Great British Bake Off” judge Prue Leith accidentally tweeted out the name of the latest season’s winner six hours too early, and she’s breaking her silence on the incident to say it was “the most idiotic thing in the world.”
“I think that was one of the worst half an hours, that first half an hour when I realized what I had done,” she told ITV’s “This Morning,” per the Guardian of the incident that happened in October.
Leith explained that she was in Bhutan, and mixed up her time zones. She had a reminder to congratulate the winner, Sophie Faldo, after 10:30, “and I thought ‘oh my God, it is past 10:30’ so I just quickly tweeted what I did.”
“Then as soon as it went I thought ‘oh my God’ and I went into a panic mode where I couldn’t work my phone and I didn’t know how to delete it quickly and I couldn’t think,” the judge continued. “And in the end I just rang my trusty PA and she said, ‘I’ve already deleted it,’ and it was 89 seconds after I had done it and that was too late, it had been retweeted.”
Leith said she feels “awful” about the whole thing.
“The thing that upset me most was I thought this will take attention off the winner, and Sophie had worked for months and months for this moment and the column inches are going to be about my tweet, not about her triumph,” she said.