PETER DE SAVARY and I got chucked out of the same public school, he for rogering his housemaster’s au pair, me for writing abusively about a teacher. He, of course, had the most fun. “Do you know, the odd thing is,” he says, puffing on a large Habana cigar, “a friend told me the school now has me on a list of high-achieving old boys. The cheek.”

But you can tell he rather enjoys it. Entrepreneur, trader, risk-taker, hotelier, friend of the late Sir Jimmy Goldsmith, the cigar-chomping De Savary has, by his own admission, made and lost fortunes, married three times, produced five daughters and had a whale of a time in the process. In recent years, with a string of top-notch hotel-club ventures, he has even made having fun his main source of income. Clever man.

“I suppose I know how to make people feel good,” he grins, before taking another long puff on his Ramon Allones. He also, it appears, knows how to make money. On Thursday he finally sold his Scottish castle-come-club Skibo — famous as the marriage venue for Madonna and other celebs — to a group of its members for an undisclosed sum, and announced he was launching another project, buying and redeveloping a great estate in Devon, part of Dartmouth National Park.

He is calling the new venture Bovey Castle, though if you ask enough questions it turns out it is actually a 1908-built crenellated hotel that is currently called the Manor House and run by the Meridien chain. But that will never do. De Savary is going to turn it into the most fantastically romantic hotel spa and call it what he likes. “Looks like a castle, feels like a castle, I’m going to bloody call it a castle.”

That indomitable determination envelops you the moment you walk into his west London house. De Savary is tearing off a tie that he put on for the photo, firing questions and getting drinks organised. Bristly-bearded, bulky, dressed in cream slacks and white monogrammed shirt, his bald head bronzed and his left wrist weighed down by an enormous Rolex, he looks like he has just stepped off a yacht in Cannes.

Funnily enough, the inside of his Chelsea house is panelled floor to ceiling in mahogany like an old ship’s room, complete with portholes looking into goldfish tanks, so perhaps he’s dressing to fit. When he tells me later that his taste is subtle, I have to laugh. And then he looks hurt and says, well, maybe eccentric then.

In truth, it’s hard to dislike him. At nearly 59, De Savary is one of the great characters of British business: chucked out of school at 16 with one O-level, he made his first fortune trading wheat to West Africa, then another trading just about anything in the Middle East.

Arms? He sees that question coming. “No, never arms. I had plenty of opportunities but I’m basically a peaceful person.”

In his time he has also bought into shipyards, airports, even run a casino, Aspinall’s, which he bought from David Aspinall, then had to sell again two years later because his mother didn’t approve of gambling. Never underestimate the power of the strong mother over the wilful entrepreneur. “No, she didn’t like it,” chortles De Savary, “gambling, you know?” It was when his friend President Sadat of Egypt asked him to build a hotel to host peace talks with the Israelis that something inside De Savary clicked. He found he liked the hospitality business. Quite why Sadat asked him to build the hotel, rather than someone logical like a hotelier, he cannot really answer, and no doubt there is a lot of self-mythologising going on. The point with De Savary is that he tells a good story, and it’s hard to interrupt. Most people after half an hour find themselves putting their hand up just to get a word in.

Anyway, for the past couple of decades he has enjoyed mixed fortunes with a variety of schemes and wheezes. He set up and sold a string of private members’ clubs called St James’s. He ran an expensive but doomed America’s Cup yachting bid. He stood unsuccessfully for parliament for Goldsmith’s Referendum party. He tried to develop John o’Groats and Land’s End as tourist attractions, and is widely considered to have taken a financial pasting at one stage, though, charactistically, he shrugs it off.

“The press concentrates on one venture out of the many I was involved in. I just made a misjudgment. The early 1990s recession turned out to be three times longer than I anticipated.” Since then he has developed Skibo, a faux-castle built by US industrialist Andrew Carnegie outside Inverness, and other club resorts in America aimed at the very rich. According to friends, he has done a very nice job.

But with whose money? Oh, different groups of co-investors, he says mysteriously. With what provable success? Well, there are always new projects on the go, rich friends apparantly queueing up to invest in the De Savary magic. How much to co-invest? Puff puff. “Not interested in anything less than £1m or £2m,” he says, finally. Otherwise there are two many people to deal with.

But what’s his own stake? Oh, don’t ask. Nobody is quite sure how much money De Savary has. Consequently he is in and out of rich lists at whim. That air of mystery clings to him like the Habana haze around his bald head, and he clearly enjoys it.