He’s the Formula One supremo who drives a Lexus, the towering billionaire who is only 5ft 4in and the yacht owner who never goes on holiday. There are more twists and turns to Bernie Ecclestone’s life than the Monaco Grand Prix.

At work he is seen as a macho operator who has made £2.4 billion; at home his two daughters worry that he just picks at salads. He gave £1 million to Labour in 1997 but says that the only Prime Minister he has ever admired is Margaret Thatcher. He is part owner of Queens Park Rangers Football Club, but says: “It’s not much fun — we’ve always got the wrong players and the wrong manager.”

His only real regret is his divorce this year, after 24 years of marriage to Slavica, a former model 28 years his junior. “Life is a game of cards,” he says. “You get dealt a hand and you have to do the best you can with what you’ve got. Maybe I’ve played well.”

We meet in a room at the Formula One headquarters in Knightsbridge. The bookcase is full of titles such as Winning is Not Enough and The Speed of Life, and there is a picture made up of Playboy cards on the wall. Mr Ecclestone, 78, appears around the door, wearing a neatly ironed white shirt, and leads the photographer off to his office. “You stay here girls,” he says, “I’m having a full frontal.”

There are some who say that Formula One is heading for a crash. Last week Mr Ecclestone negotiated another hair-raising chicane when some of the teams threatened to walk out and set up their own series. His old friend Max Mosley might have stopped being the head of racing’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, after he was accused of being a “dictator”, but the man who is said to run the sport with an iron fist thinks that despots are underrated. “If you have a look at a democracy it hasn’t done a lot of good for many countries — including this one. I like people who make up their minds. If you have to keep referring to your grandmother before you do anything I think that’s dumb. I make decisions, sometimes wrong, sometimes right — so long as you get more things right than wrong then that’s OK.”

Although he admits that the News of the World’s exposé of Mr Mosley’s German fantasy S&M sex sessions was embarrassing, he had no moral objections. “People can do what they like. I had known Max for 40 years and I had no idea he was involved in this sort of thing. In fact, I said to him, ‘I’ve been invited to all the meetings you’ve had but you forgot to invite me to this one’.”

Sir Oswald Mosley’s son would, Mr Ecclestone says, make an excellent Prime Minister. “I prefer strong leaders. Margaret Thatcher made decisions on the run and got the job done. She was the one who built this country up slowly. We’ve let it go down again.

“All these guys, Gordon and Tony, are trying to please everybody all the time . . . Max would do a super job, he’s a good leader. I don’t think his background would be a problem.”

He has more to say on the shortcomings of democracy. “Politicians are too worried about elections. We did a terrible thing when we supported the idea of getting rid of Saddam Hussein, he was the only one who could control that country. It was the same [with the Taleban]. We move into countries and we have no idea of the culture. The Americans probably thought Bosnia was a town in Miami. There are people starving in Africa and we sit back and do nothing, but we get involved in things we should leave alone.”

Does he have a favourite historical dictator — Stalin, perhaps, or Mussolini? “Maggie’s gone,” he says. Then he pauses and continues, thoughtfully: “In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was in the way that he could command a lot of people able to get things done.”

He must know that this is controversial — particularly given the allegations against Mr Mosley — but the delivery is deadpan rather than deliberately provocative. He seems to see Hitler as a passive bystander who was too weak to stop the Holocaust.

“In the end he got lost so he wasn’t a very good dictator. Either he knew what was going on and insisted, or he just went along with it — either way he wasn’t a dictator.”