Richard Mellon Scaife, the reclusive right-wing billionaire who financed a “family values” crusade that almost bought down President Bill Clinton, has offered surprising praise for the politician he once despised - and admitted they both share an interest in philandering.

The heir to the Mellon banking fortune was once scorned by Democrats as the shadowy figure behind what Hillary Clinton dubbed “the vast right-wing conspiracy”.

Mr Scaife backed the so-called Arkansas Project that produced a series of stories in the American Spectator magazine into Mr Clinton’s sex life, including the notorious “Troopergate” piece that spurred Paula Jones’ sexual harrassment suit against the president for allegedly exposing himself to her in a hotel room.

Mr Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper also relentlessly pursued conspiracy theories surrounding the suicide of White House aide Vince Foster, which he once called “Rosetta Stone of the Clinton Administration.” Yet in his first interview since President Clinton left office, Mr Scaife told yesterday’s edition of Vanity Fair magazine that he had recently had lunch with Mr Clinton. He declared: “I’ve never met such a charismatic man in my whole life.” Now in the midst of a messy divorce from his second wife, Mr Scaife noted that both he and the former president had both strayed in their marriages. Philandering, he said, ’is something that Bill Clinton and I have in common.” “I don’t want people throwing rocks at me in the street. But I believe in open marriage,” he explained.

The two hour and fifteen-minute private lunch at the former president’s New York office last summer ended with Mr Clinton giving Mr Scaife an autographed copy of his autobiography, “My Life.” When the billionaire returned home to Pittsburgh, he wrote a $100,000 cheque for the former president’s charity, the Clinton Global Initiative.

Mr Scaife, 75, owes his $1.4 billion fortune to the fact that he is the great-nephew of Andrew Mellon, the banker and industrialist who served as Treasury secretary to three presidents. The family has diversified its holdings into coal, steel, property and the Gulf Oil Corporation.

Mr Scaife became involved in Republican politics during Barry Goldwater’s landmark, but ultimately unsuccessful, 1964 presidential campaign. After backing President Richard Nixon, he became disillusioned with him during the Watergate scandal and concentrated his donations on right-wing groups such as the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society.

Mr Scaife divorced Frances, the mother of his two children, in 1994 with a reported settlement of $35 million.

The very same week, he married his second wife, Ritchie, whom he had met at a dinner party a decade earlier while she was also still married. Their lavish wedding raised eyebrows among Pittsburgh’s society matrons when the new bride put on a firework display for her fireworks-loving husband that read: “Ritchie Loves Dick.” In an unconventional arrangement, the couple lived in separate houses a few blocks apart in a wealthy part of Pittsburgh. At one point, they checked in together to the Betty Ford Centre, the famous substance-abuse clinic. Mr Scaife, who has struggled with alcoholism, descibed Ritchie as a “total pill popper”. But she denies having a drug problem and says she was only there in the “family programme” to support her husband.

The marriage collapsed when Ritchie hired a private detective to tail her husband in 2005/. The private eye photographed the septuagenarian billionaire at a motel with a tall 43-year-old blonde named Tammy Vasco, who has two previous arrests for prostitution.

Mr Scaife barred Ritchie from entering his Georgian mansion and had her arrested when she crept inside to spy on him through the dining room window. Ritchie, 60, spent a night in jail before the charges were dropped.

Ritchie was arrested a second time in April 2006 when she allegedly scratched and kicked two of her estranged husbands’ housekeepers on the street. The charges were eventually dismissed.

Details of the couple’s divorce filings became public in September when they were mistakenly posted on a court web-site. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the liberal rival of Mr Scaife’s Pittsburgh paper, reported that the billionaire was paying Ritchie court-ordered interim support of $725,000-a-month.

His estranged wife calls their marriage “the torment of the damned.” “I have no bitterness. I just want to go forward. And I hope that he is happy. I don’t wish anything bad to happen to him. And it’s just say for me that we couldn’t end our marriage in a dignified way.” On his lawyer’s advice, Mr Scaife refused to tell Vanity Fair how he met Ms Vasco. But he called her “a very loving individual” and said they were still dating.

He vowed, however, he would never get married again. “Too many responsibilities,” he said.

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