John Madejski sits back to admire the view. “This is my favourite restaurant in the whole wide world, the food, the wine, but mostly the view. Look at that view across the river. Fantastic. The English countryside as you’d want to imagine it. I came here as a young man when it was a pub, but I never dreamed that I would one day own it.”

We are sitting at Madejski’s favourite table at The Leatherne Bottel, overlooking the Thames in a picturesque part of Berkshire. This was the setting for The Wind in the Willows – its author Kenneth Grahame lived in nearby Pangbourne. It’s so glorious outside that I tell Madejski I am half expecting to see people punting along the river, wearing full English boater-and-blazer regalia. Madejski laughs. He laughs a lot. “You probably would in the summer,” he replies and suggests I order wine.

Madejski made his fortune selling advertising space for second-hand cars, and is determined not to lose it as chairman of an English Premier League football club. He has business interests around the world. As well as restaurants, he invests in property, hotels, publishing and broadcast media. In his home town of Reading, Berkshire, he is more than a businessman, he is a brand. He has helped transform the nondescript town into a modern centre of commerce, pumping his money into office and property developments, a local school and art gallery (named after him) and the local football team, which has a plush new stadium (also bearing his name).

Madejski is worth £400m, has two country mansions, places in Chelsea and the Galapagos islands and a penthouse suite at the football club where he lives most of the time. He is tall, dressed in pink tie, blue shirt and dark grey suit, and looks younger than 66.

Having scoured the wine list anxiously, I choose a Beaujolais, which is met with disapproval, so I plump for a robust St Emilion. He smiles and nods. Madejski loves fine wine. He only drinks French, usually red and from Burgundy. The Les Roches Blanches I have chosen is from Bordeaux, a slight faux pas on my part, although he doesn’t seem to mind.

We order our food, roast saddle of venison for me, roast fillet of sea bass for him. He settles back in his chair, where he dines once or twice a week. I’m feeling more relaxed too, helped by surroundings that lift the spirits. There are contemporary paintings but the restaurant retains the cosy feel of a Victorian cottage, which is exactly what it once was. This seems like a good moment to raise the football question.

Madejski launched Auto Trader, a magazine that used pictures to sell second-hand cars, in 1976. An initial outlay of £2,000 turned into £260m when he sold it in 1998. But, I now feel bold enough to ask, is he rich enough to compete at the top table of football, the English Premier League?

“No. I’m not rich enough to compete in the Premiership,” he says matter of factly. “I’m worth a few million, but you have to be worth a few billion to compete today. Roman Abramovich [the Russian billionaire who bought Chelsea Football Club in 2003] has seen to that. Even people like Mohamed Al Fayed [the owner of Fulham Football Club] aren’t rich enough. He may own Harrods, but his football club isn’t among the big teams.”

Our food arrives. Madejski asks the waiter to take the skin off his sea bass and takes a sip of mineral water. “I’ve done what I want to do with Reading – and that was to get the team into the Premiership. Getting Reading into the Premiership for the first time was one of my proudest moments.” (Reading were promoted to the Premiership in 2006 for the first time since they were formed in 1871.) “Having been chairman for 18 long years, I am ready to go. The club is not for sale but I’ve always said if there’s a benevolent billionaire out there with loads of dosh, then come and have a chat.”

Do you think the money in football, the amount players are paid, is out of control? I ask. My venison is delicious, so delicious I’m not paying attention and have to ask him to repeat the start of his answer.

“Yes, definitely,” Madejski says again. “But that’s market forces. You can’t complain, but the players have become spoilt – everything is so money-oriented. It would cost me £35m to turn our 24,500-seater stadium into a capacity of 38,000, yet most people would never make a million pounds in their lives, let alone £35m. As for footballers’ wages, it’s ridiculous. Even average players are paid a fortune.” Madejski is on a roll.

“But you have to recognise how blessed this country is in having the English Premiership. It is truly a great asset globally. It is something that we should be very proud of. It has certainly helped put a place like Reading on the map. We now have fans in America, Africa and the Far East. It’s not just Manchester United that attracts overseas supporters. I’ve always realised the power of football from my travelling days in my early twenties. You would be in some out-of-the-way place in the Far East and you would come across a paper with the English football results. Today English football is even more popular.”

I drain my wine, and the attentive waiter immediately refills my glass. The wine just gets better. Madejski tells me that’s because it’s been decanted. “You need to wait a while before you drink it,” he says. I notice his glass is still half full.

Madejski is reportedly a supporter of the Conservatives, yet Auto Trader ended up in the hands of The Guardian Media Group. It gave the publisher of The Guardian, Britain’s leading liberal newspaper, the bulk of its profits in recent years.

He is reluctant to be drawn on politics. He no longer identifies with the Conservative party, preferring to label himself a capitalist and a businessman. Politics has become a beauty parade with little substance and little to differentiate the two main parties, he says.

I take my last mouthful of venison, and scrape the last of the red wine sauce off my plate. Only a lettuce leaf remains. Madejski, I notice, has finished every scrap, even the greens. I neatly place my knife and fork on my plate, and the waiter appears and asks in an endearingly hesitant manner for our dessert orders. Madejski opts for nougatine panna cotta. I decide on the tiramisu.

Madejski left school with no qualifications, travelled the world, and had what he calls his “eureka moment” in Florida in 1976, when a girlfriend showed him a tacky, amateurish-looking magazine that sold cars using pictures. I ask whether he thinks he could have made a fortune today, now we have so much emphasis on education and qualifications?

“Yes, I could. Education is important, but if you’re a lateral thinker and have common sense, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get on. The only qualification I’ve got is a driving licence, but I didn’t need qualifications to become a businessman. You need ideas, and mine was very simple.

“Education matters a lot, but I’ve never understood why politicians are so obsessed with getting more and more people into university. It’s not right for everyone. If you are determined and prepared to make sacrifices, you can do a great deal in your life, and that is still true today. My business partner, Paul Gibbons, and I were told by W.H. Smith when we tried to get them interested in our idea that it hadn’t got a snowball in hell’s chance of working. But we persisted. We struggled for the first two years, then it took off.” Our desserts arrive.

Madejski has backed his belief that education matters by becoming the sponsor of an academy school in a deprived area of Reading. The John Madejski Academy takes 90 per cent of its pupils from the local area and 10 per cent on academic merit, and specialises in sport.

“If you asked me what gave me the most fulfilment in terms of largesse, I would have to say it’s the academy because it is changing the lives of kids. I was at Downing Street and Tony Blair asked me if I would be interested in supporting an academy. I said yes, but it would have to be in Reading. I think every child who goes to a school brings something to the party. The challenge is to discover what a child is good at and help them achieve. If a teacher can do that, it is a really wonderful thing.”

Madejski is also a patron of the arts, investing £3m to create a new space at London’s Royal Academy of Art, £2m for a garden at the Victoria & Albert Museum, as well as being a benefactor for an arts gallery in Reading.

“I like fine things: food, wine, art, cars... I like the good things in life,” he says. “You’re only here once, so enjoy it. You come into this world with nothing and you leave with nothing. All that you have in life is what you borrow. As a journalist once said of me, I’ve borrowed more than most.”

We finish our dessert, and Madejski takes the last sip of his wine. I have long finished mine, in spite of his advice to drink it slowly. The waiter arrives, yet again with perfect timing. It’s been a leisurely meal so we decide against coffee and opt for the bill instead. Madejski is already an hour late for his board-meeting.

Feeling full, I just about squeeze back into his Bentley Continental GT for a lift to the football club, where I can catch a (slightly less glamorous) bus for the rest of my journey home. It’s late afternoon and the sun has long departed, but it’s still quite a view.

David Oakley is an FT correspondent

...............................................................

The Leatherne Bottel,
Goring-on-Thames, Berkshire
1 x roast fillet of wild sea bass
1 x roast saddle of venison
1 x garden salad
1 x steamed spinach
1 x nougative panna cotta
1 x tiramisu mont blanc
1 x Les Roches Blanches, St Emilion 2003
2 x mineral water
Total: £129.80