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The cookery writer provided one of the comic moments of the four-day extravaganza when the Jaguar she was riding in came to a halt in The Mall and had to be pushed around the rest of the route, before being quietly retired outside Buckingham Palace, by four men in fluorescent yellow jackets.

But Dame Prue, 82, appeared unfazed by the experience and continued to wave enthusiastically at the crowd, as members of the Royal Family craned their necks to see what had happened.

She laughed about it all in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour with Emma Barnett, who asked her if she got to her destination.

“Yes, they pushed me all the way to Buckingham Palace,” she said, laughing.

“Our Jag had a battery that was a bit flat.”

She said there had been problems starting the 1951 mk V Jaguar, part of the Dames in their Jags section of the Pageant, from the beginning.

“We lined up in Horse Guards Parade and that’s where it started. And they had to jump start it then. And then it didn’t like going slowly. So it did sort of kangaroo leaps – little jerks – if it was asked to go very slowly because the people in front of us were walking.

“Anyway it finally just died in the middle of The Mall.”

Dame Prue felt for her driver, Lucy Davenport, 27, whose husband’s family own the car but insisted she had not been embarrassed.

“It was just very funny. I mean it didn’t matter at all. The whole event was so good humoured that almost anything could have gone wrong and it would have been fine.”

She admitted she felt guilty about not not helping to push the car despite offering. “I really felt really guilty because in a normal life you’d get out and help push. But I couldn’t have got out of that Jag without help anyway. You know I’m very old,” she laughed.

It was the driver, Lucy, she felt for though. “I was so sorry for the girl who was driving us because she said she had never done anything like this before. She was a very good driver but she just…and she felt so humiliated,” she said.

The young chauffeur admitted: “It was the longest five minutes of my life.”

But Dame Prue insisted: “If that was all that went wrong – and I must say that was an amazingly well-organised pageant, you think of the thousands of people involved and it went like clockwork – if the worst thing that happens is cook gets stuck in The Mall, it’s not very bad.”

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