Great British Bake Off host Dame Prue Leith has taken a playful swipe at UK cities after returning from Turkmenistan. The esteemed baker humorously suggested that dictatorships can sometimes be admired for their efficiency. Citing Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, she compared its cleanliness to London and confessed it made her feel "ashamed" to be British. Despite her critique of London's cleanliness, Prue acknowledged the clear drawbacks and lack of freedoms in dictatorships, reports GloucestershireLive.

Speaking on The Travel Diaries podcast about her trip, she said: "You do in the end have a reluctant admiration for dictatorships because when they want to rebuild something they just say 'Sorry guys your'e all moving out, we're going to rebuild this place, and you will now live over here'. "Providing their dictators are benevolent it's a really good system. Ashgabat really astonished me, it's a beautiful city. International architects, the whole thing is nearly all white marble because the president decreed that he wanted to have the whitest, cleanest city, in the world."

Prue concluded: "In these countries it makes you ashamed to be British because, if you walk around London it's disgusting. It's absolutely filthy, there are little bits of it which are perfect, but most of it is pretty grim.

"Whereas these towns, there's no litter, there's no crime, because they just lock anybody up if they do anything wrong, they're brutal."

Back home in the UK, Prue has been advocating for the legalization of assisted dying, driven in part by her brother David's difficult passing in 2012. She expressed her desire to end her own life if faced with a similar prognosis to The i.

She said: "I hope the assisted dying bill goes through. I've been campaigning for it for 12 years, ever since my elder brother died such a horrible death.

"If the law is passed, and I get to the stage when I know that I'm about to have a really horrible time, I will top myself. If the law isn't passed, I'll probably do it anyway, because I'll be dead. They can hardly prosecute me."

In a previous conversation with Sky, Prue spoke about the emotional toll of watching her brother suffer and the desperation that came with being unable to help him.

She said: "He was spending every three weeks out of four in absolute agony. For his family to be round while he was crying, begging to die, begging to be given more morphine, it was desperate to watch.

"I think about this quite often, my younger brother had a really good death, my older brother had the one we described. And honestly, I want to die like my younger brother died. At home, free of pain."