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Friends say it’s a bit of an act but are adamant that he’s absolutely straightforward in business deals. His former merchant banker, Sir Victor Blank, calls him “wonderfully irrepressible”.

You suspect De Savary was born that way. It helped him cope with his parents’ divorce when he was just two. He was dragged to Venezuela, then Canada after his mother’s new marriage to a Shell executive, while his father, a French-born pig farmer, ran through various ventures — farming, furniture making — in the West Country.

It helped him cope with an occasionally brutal boarding school, too. Charm, resilience, and a willingness to improvise became his survival techniques, as useful for selling to the unconvinced as for seducing au pairs. That early exit from Charterhouse school also made him suspicious of establishment standards. So he has never settled down for long, always moved from project to project, worked as a fixer on others’ deals, running his businesses with a mainly female team.

Why? “Women are loyal and try harder and are more fun to go for a drink with at the end of the day.” And he is by nature an opportunist, even citing John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King, every chancer’s top film, as his favourite.

Yet how ironic that he should end up parlaying all that outsider’s nous into running resorts for the megarich — something so establishment, if you like.

Well, maybe the establishment has changed, and he clearly loves the properties. So why sell Skibo? His co- investors wanted an exit strategy. He could have sold it to a hotel chain, but that would have broken his heart, so he cut a deal with the people who most liked using it. Bought it for £5m, did it up for £10m, ran it at a profit, sold it for something up to, it is rumoured, £30m. Not bad.

Will he slow down when he hits 60 next year? Maybe, he says. He wants to write his autobiography, and spend more time doing good works.

De Savary has had a wild life, but he’s been happily married for a long time to his third wife and has three young daughters growing up. He needs to give something back. “I want to make more of a contribution.” One daughter, from his first marriage, now a doctor, gives him insight into how tough it is out there.

But there’s still business to do. So he is moving on to sort out “Bovey Castle”. There’s property to develop in the Bahamas and Tuscany, too.

So many people want to co- invest in his Tuscan project, he says, it’s just very difficult to choose. I’m sure.

Anyway, he adds, as I edge out of the door, he’s going to invite me and my wife to Bovey Castle when it opens next Easter, with its pool and spa, golf course and top chef and brand-new crenellated wing he’s going to build, and in return . . .

I have to write something nice about him? “No,” he grins, “You have to write to me objectively about what’s good and what’s not.”

Pure De Savary: the nicest squeeze you could ever feel. I’m packing already.