When Bill Clinton was on the ropes over the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1999, Hillary Clinton famously alleged that her husband was the victim of a “vast rightwing conspiracy”. Yesterday Richard Mellon Scaife, whom many Clinton supporters see as the personification of that “conspiracy”, came very close to endorsing her embattled candidacy, writing of his “very favorable” impression of her reports the Financial Times.

In a piece for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a newspaper owned by Mr. Scaife, the billionaire heir to the Mellon family oil and aluminum fortune delivered the latest bizarre twist to a race that has consistently made mincemeat of conventional wisdom.

It coincided with Mrs. Clinton’s emphatic rejection, in an interview with the Washington Post yesterday, of speculation she would cave in to calls for her to withdraw from the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

Mrs. Clinton, who is unlikely to overtake Barack Obama in the popular vote in the remaining primaries, said that if necessary she would take her nomination battle to the Democratic convention in late August, where it would be resolved by the unelected “superdelegates” whose decision will ultimately settle the race.

“I know there are some people who want to shut this down and I think they are wrong,” said Mrs. Clinton. “I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started . . . and if we don’t resolve it, we’ll resolve it at the convention.”

Any doubts Clinton critics may have had about her determination to stick at it may also have been put to rest by her decision to speak to Mr. Scaife’s hostile paper last week - the political equivalent of walking into a lion’s den.

Read it here: Clinton gains convert amid calls to pull out of Presidential Race