For many years, Sir Paul Carter has been a towering figure across the Kent political landscape, latterly as Conservative leader of the county council.

But how many would know he is a private school drop-out turned second-hand car dealer with a keen eye for business? Simon Finlay hears his life and times…

He is perhaps the most recognisable figure in local politics away from the Westminster bubble.

Given the low profile some MPs prefer these days, he is arguably the best known in the county, even four years after he stepped down as leader of Kent County Council (KCC).

For 14 years, Sir Paul Carter CBE led the authority through some perilous times, not least the 2008 financial crash and fall-out from Brexit, earning a knighthood in 2020 from the Queen.

He earned a reputation for single-mindedness and a dogged pursuit in what he believed to be the right thing to do.

At the bottom of memos and letters, he would stamp the letters "JFDI" - "Just F***ing Do It", which perhaps sums up the relentlessness of his time at the top of KCC.

His public-facing demeanour, especially on TV, might have appeared a little imperious and gruff, but privately, friends say, he is a likeable, friendly and funny bloke who likes a gossip.

Paul Benedict Crossland Carter was born in Chatham in 1955 to a tea broker father, whose wartime role as a Captain in the Royal Engineers included bomb clearance from Cromer to Clacton.

It was a "happy" family unit with five children and from an early age he was forever to be found "under things", taking them apart and putting them back together. A love for the internal combustion engine was born and the passion for cars and motor racing has endured to this day.

The young Carter was packed off to a Catholic boarding school in the Mendips for his secondary education.

Despite enjoying sport (a tall, athletic rugby second row and decent batsman in cricket), he hated the place and persuaded his reluctant father to let him leave at 15, on condition he attended a further education college in Kent to take his A-levels.

"My dad had this view that you had to have a qualification to your name or you wouldn't amount to anything.

"My brother and sister were both doctors so I set about doing science A-levels with a view to doing medicine."

At college, his new peer group - "an eclectic bunch" - included young foreign students from well-to-do families retaking flunked exams but a renal illness in his final year meant he failed to get the grades for medical school.

So he moved to Hammersmith, west London, where his exceptional eyesight got him a job at a hospital studying slides for cervical cancer.

Having failed to get the chance to become a doctor and living in a flat in Earls Court with mates, he found himself without any real purpose in life.

"In the early 1970s," recalls Sir Paul, "I was driving through the City of London in my dad's Range Rover and there were all these beautiful women and well-groomed men in tailored pinstripe suits and became intrigued by what they were doing there."

He was intrigued enough to get a job as an insurance broker at Lloyds of London but even a career in a steady City job was insufficient to keep his restless mind occupied.

The young Carter started to buy old cars, restore and sell them (especially sporty doer-upper MGBs) - often to Australians "doing Europe" and buying them back before they went home.

It began to become a way of life - insurance brokering by day, flogging motors by night.

"I could sell a car every week and make a hundred quid as well as working."

Considering £100 is the equivalent of £1,600 today, small wonder Sir Paul remembers a "really good social life".

Realising he needed a garage and more space, he found the perfect place for £15,000 off the Gloucester Road.

Whether he knew it or not, a new business venture was conceived - buying, renovating and selling houses for profit.

Needing to learn the ropes, he joined an estate agency which promptly fired him when he found out he was plotting to set up a rival firm on the same patch.

Sir Paul has been in the property game and some allied businesses for nigh on 40 years.

Once his business was up and running he decided to become a Conservative MP - a selection process he failed by a perceived lack of assertiveness and not telling the panel about his business acumen.

"I thought that was a bit vulgar. I knew I was good at making money and that I wanted to do something else, do some good."

In the 1990s, he got elected to Maidstone Borough Council but lost the seat four years later. Legendary KCC leader Sandy Bruce-Lockhart stepped in and suggested he try for county instead in 1997 and was successful.

Clearly impressed, Bruce-Lockhart offered Cllr Carter the education portfolio - a topic he knew next to nothing about. But he soon twigged the system needed an overhaul - not least in attainment, teaching and replacing crumbling classrooms.

A source of immense pride was that his campaign for special schools for children with complex needs was at first dismissed by Government but later accepted as a beacon.

"I knew it was the right thing to do, I just had to sort of demonstrate it worked, get the point across."

Sir Paul hoped the same would happen with vocational education using the Dutch model of allowing students two days a week at specialist centres.

"That was fine until the Tories got into power (in 2010) and the education secretary Michael Gove decided that modern languages were the way ahead."

In 2005, he succeeded Bruce-Lockhart in the KCC top job.

Life as leader was "hectic, non-stop and very challenging at times but I always tried to make time for my family and a spot of motor racing".

He adds: "It was very, very demanding. I was working from 7am until 7pm, at least, every day with evening functions and very often stuff to do at the weekends.

On Sir Paul's long watch, he had to contend with, among other things, the fallout from the global financial crash, Brexit, the closure of Pfizer, Operation Stack/Brock and squeezed budgets.

"The reason I stood down (in 2019) was that nobody gets any younger. When the weekends came around, I was so tired I couldn't enjoy them. That's getting silly."

Six years into his tenure, Sir Paul had faced a leadership challenge which he fended off with a certain aplomb.

With two recent unsuccessful assaults on his job, the current leader Roger Gough knows how it feels.

What it did do was create a distraction at a time when Cllr Gough needs to face Kent's financial realities in the short and medium term - but also fed into a narrative which conveys an impression the group is split.

Only 17 of 61 Conservative members voted against Cllr Gough at his re-election in early October - but will that be enough to steady the ship?

"Time will tell," he says with a smirk. "It's a difficult job in difficult times. Every leader has a different style and different priorities."

There is a section of the Conservative backbench who would dearly love to see Sir Paul return.

"I have no ambition to be leader again," he says abruptly. He pauses and then offers an explanation that, contrary to most leadership ambition denials, actually rings true.

"Since then, I have developed a load of other outside interests and I have certainly no desire to go back to having that amount of demand on my lifestyle. I am a workaholic but I am free to choose."

Along the way, he has picked up a CBE and his 2020 knighthood from the late Queen's Birthday Honours' List.

The issues facing Sir Paul six years ago in attempting to balance the books are as nothing to the breath-taking efficiencies required in the coming years coming down the track for his successor.

Considering the issue of local government funding is becoming so critical, why does the government appear not to be listening? He has no answer.

"I suppose it's not high on the government's priority list and in my three decades of service, it has diminished year on year on year. The stark fact is that local government is run on 30% less than it was 12 years ago."

Cllr Gough and his second in command have categorically stated that KCC is not on the verge of issuing a section 114 notice - an effective declaration a council is bankrupt and unable to meet its statutory obligations.

Covid-19 has changed the dynamic of how people work. There are few members in huddles in the corridors these days, virtually no convivial lunches or nipping out or a coffee.

Sir Paul says: "There's very little socialising any more. A lot of people only come in a couple of days a week. You'd very rarely run into a senior officer about the place, go for a cup tea and a toasted sandwich. None of that serendipity or happenstance."

KCC's days are numbered at County Hall (Sessions House is up for sale) and there is a view that so are the council's.

"The reason I stood down was that nobody gets any younger. When the weekends came around, I was so tired I couldn't enjoy them. That's getting silly."

The conversation around a new style of authority to replace the county, borough and district councils seems to be growing louder by the day.

Among the options to be considered is for Kent and Medway to have a directly-elected mayor to manage and implement a devolution deal.

Although favoured by Cllr Gough, the Mayoral County Combined Authority model has left many in his own party and others overwhelmed by indifference.

Sir Paul accepts something has to change and he says a conversion from the old system to a unitary has been demonstrated by Baroness Jane Scott in Wiltshire.

Rather than one super authority, he sees the future of the county as having three unitary bodies to replace more than a dozen serving Kent's near two million residents today.

Even aged 68, friends say he is unable to stop working but does enjoy more time at his large Maidstone home with his Dubliner wife Breda, with whom he has had three children, now grown up.

Whatever happens, it is currently unlikely that he will have another stab at the big chair - and certainly not while there is an internal combustion engine to fiddle about in.