"Bombastic, controversial, mercurial, brilliant." All these adjectives and more have been levelled at newspaper chief and football revolutionary Jim Thompson. The former Kent Messenger managing director and Maidstone United chairman has never strayed far from controversy or, indeed, irony - this is, after all, the man who once banned his own paper from attending his own team's matches. But what became of the mercurial Maidstone magnate? Chris Hunter found out.

In November 1991 Maidstone United football club was in financial ruin; 90 years since its foundation the team was homeless and protracted efforts to find a new ground had ended in failure.

Supporters found themselves facing the depths of football despair when only two years previously they'd been riding high following promotion to the then fourth division.

Look back through newspaper cuttings from that fateful year and you'd expect to find fans and players lambasting the man then at the club's helm, chairman Jim Thompson.

You might expect to, but you don't, says Mr Thompson. For the ex-chairman, now 74, the idea that he let the club slip beyond rescue, through ground-sharing at Dartford, is a myth that grew up in the wilderness years that followed his club's demise.

And, as he explains, it's a myth he wants to see the back of.

"It's bad enough to have something crushed after spending 22 years of your life building it," says Mr Thompson, "but to have someone turn round and blame you for it, that hurts."

Reports that he was subsequently banned from involvement with football clubs after the affair have since been blown out of proportion, he says. "I was told to keep out of football for three months. I could have fought the decision but it wasn't worth it.

"Not even the KM blamed me at the time. It's only in the last 10 years that this gradual vilification of me has arrived."

The fact that Mr Thompson remained president of the Football Conference from 1989 to 2007 does something to support his claim.

The truth behind the club's failure, he says, is that Maidstone simply had nowhere to go.

Without a home ground they could not generate ticket sales to support the club; and when Maidstone council turned down an application for a new ground at Hollingbourne - a site which the council itself had identified - the club was doomed.

For the then Maidstone chairman it amounted to nothing less than betrayal.

"We had picked the site they told us to choose. The KM ran a survey, and the borough was 80 per cent in favour of the plan. Even in Hollingbourne the vote was split.

"Then we went to the planning department and thrashed it out in the greatest of detail.

"At the last minute my planning consultant said: 'I've got a deep suspicion the planning department is going to change course', and they did.

"They knew full well we were at the end of the road. We had calculated we would get planning permission that day.

"They turned us down and that was it; the club was finished.

"It was disbelief. Everybody sat and cried. I was with the supporters, I was in the middle of the crowd. They said: 'Come on Jim, fight.'

"Queens Counsel said there was a 70 to 80 per cent chance of us winning an appeal but it would cost £180,000.

"We didn't have the money because we'd spent it getting the planning application right.

"I then bought back from the liquidators all the equipment, the tractors, goalposts. I felt I had done what they needed me to do.

"I wasn't glad to leave, but I didn't have the drive - 22 years I had been chairman, I was absolutely gutted."

The irony now is that this same site has since been earmarked for the huge 250-acre Kent International Gateway freight depot; a planning application which may become something of a headache for today's Maidstone planners.

Is this a kind of rough justice, perhaps?

He laughs, adding quickly: "I've never said such a thing."

But there's a wicked glint in his eye.

"Isn't it ironic, they could have had all of this; it would have been a fantastic sports stadium; with 10 outdoor tennis courts and indoor courts.

"It was going to have a cinema and nightclubs. It's all history now.

"The real irony is that I'm now on the main sub committee of the joint parishes committee fighting against KIG," he says.

Talk to those who remember Mr Thomspon in his younger days and you get a picture of a man people admired but never crossed.

Today he recalls the more explosive moments of his career with a kind of half-suppressed glee such as the time he banned the Kent Messenger from Maidstone games.

"There were squabbles and fights. I banned them from the ground. There was a report which I thought was grossly unfair. I said if you can't report matches better than that then off you go."

It's perhaps no coincidence that both the newspaper industry and football league chose to honour him with decorative miniature cannons as commemorative gifts.

But his volatility came in handy in the business world.

"I could be quite ruthless." he admits; "When I joined the KM it was in a bit of a pickle. I completely restructured it.

"Edwin Boorman (then chairman of the Kent Messenger) said I had a combination of being a dreamer who was also a detailed manager - although I dreamed dreams, I made them come true."

Recognised as something of an advertising whizz-kid in the newspaper industry, he is credited with turning the Kent Messenger into a tabloid-style paper and boosting the company's fortunes.

His success was such that he was handed a branch of the group itself - Adverkit International - as a leaving present.

However you view Jim Thompson, he's never really left his Geordie roots.

He still wears his Newcastle shirt when the matches are on TV and says he was once even offered the opportunity of a job as a director for the "Toon".

After a discussion with his wife of 50 years, Katie, he decided to turn it down. Is it a regret?

"Yes, it probably is, but you can't do everything," he admits.

"We decided that we were part of Kent and the kids lived in London."

And what would he have thought about working with Newcastle's new manager, Kevin Keegan?

Wouldn't it have been a dream team, both men renowned for a daring approach to business and football?

Thompson dismissed the idea.

"I tried it at Maidstone with a guy called Carr who we got from Northampton.

"He was a broad Geordie; it was going to be the dream Geordie ticked - 'Carry' and I - but he was useless."

And, as you'd expect, Thompson told Graham Carr - the father of comedian Alan Carr - as much.

"Oh yeah, I fired him," he laughs.

His firing days now behind him, Thompson is a little more laid back, and while he still has a Jaguar XK in his garage, he's more likely to be seen walking boxer dog Parker on the "extremely clean and well-kept" footpaths of Otham than tearing around its country lanes.

But then it's never been purely about the business success for Thompson; his approach is a more idealistic one that some would give him credit for.

"Even in school I thought I would go into business," he recalls.

"I thought academia was the wrong way to go, but it wasn't just for the money.

"The attraction is that you create things and keep society going."

What would have happened if Thompson had been allowed to follow this philosophy in Kent's county town, we will never know.

That, as Thompson says, is all history now.