"If he didn't exist, somebody like Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene would have invented him ... the archetypal international playboy with an acid tongue, a deadlier pen and the attitude of a 19th century aristocrat with a redundancy of money sufficient to allow him to do and say whatever he damn well pleases and get away with it.

But he does exist, and his name is Taki Theodoracopulos - better known simply as Taki. The heir to Greek shipping and textile megafortune, the 63-year-old proudly boasts of his boozing and notorious philandering, gleefully sticks pins in stuffed shirts, liberals and phonies and appears to be having a whale of a good time outraging his targets which include all the high priests of political correctness and high priestesses of feminism.

PC he is not.

Taki, whose column in the New York Press joyfully skewers anyone who strikes him as massively de classe or even faintly on the left, is now embarked on a brand new venture - backing a new magazine - the American Conservative - Pat Buchanan's newest venture launched yesterday in Washington at the National Press Club - a haunt of many of the very people Taki scorns with aristocratic hauteur.

And they don't appear to think all that highly of him. In reporting on the occasion, The Washington Post's Peter Carlson couldn't get past the second paragraph without mentioning Taki's 1984 arrest for jauntily striding through British customs with "23 grams of cocaine dangling out of his back pocket."

Taki shares partner Buchanan's displeasure with the so-called neo-conservatives who constitute what the old right nowadays calls the "war party" that conglomeration that is actively promoting a war with Iraq. Principal war chief and neocon, Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, is not pleased with the new magazine in general or Taki in particular.

Kristol told the Post he's not worried about the new rival mag. "I don't intend to pay much attention to it," he said. "I think Taki is really a kind of repulsive character, and I'm not a huge fan of Pat's, either."

Taki has digs in London, New York and Gstaad, Switzerland, owns a luxurious yacht which replaces the one which somehow got blown up and is reluctant to say how much of his exchequer into which he has dipped to help fund the magazine.

"Gentlemen never discuss money," he informed the Press Club peasantry.

When asked which he found a more enjoyable way to spend his money -- funding a political magazine or snorting cocaine he said: "It's not even close. Making a magazine, you feel good the next day."

After stating that he hadn't used drugs since his four-month term in a British prison after his 1984 arrest he said. "I'm not a druggie, I'm a boozer."

He is also proud of his playboy lifestyle. A married man, he still defends playing around "Womanizing is a matter of honor," he once told a London reporter. "The more the better."

The Post noted that he wrote an essay in 1982 called "Why American Women Are Lousy Lovers." When asked why he explained "That article had nothing to do with the sexual act," he said. "It was an anti-feminist tract."

He went on to castigate American men for divorcing their wives and marrying younger women, instead of simply taking mistresses as proper Europeans are wont do. "We take care of the woman. We put her on a pedestal. And then we fool around." " (Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com staff, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2002)