Who's the King of the mingers?

Sienna Miller hasn't wasted much time in getting over impossibly good-looking Jude Law. Barely a month after their break-up, it's goodbye handsome prince and hello... er, scruffy waif.

Ladies, meet Tom Sturridge, a 25-year-old actor best known for his appearance in Richard Curtis's film The Boat That Rocked. You would have thought that a high-maintenance girl like Sienna would be more interested in his best friend, the leonine teen-trembler Robert Pattinson, but no, there is something about Sturridge's greasy strands and trampish clobber that has Hollywood's leading ladies falling at his feet.

For Sienna is not alone in finding the whiff of unwashed hair strangely alluring. Carey Mulligan has also enjoyed Sturridge's attentions and an ES spy who recently sat next to him at the Flare Path opening night starring Sienna can confirm that he is rather tasty. Carey's latest amour is, apparently, Marcus Mumford, 24-year-old lead singer and founder of folk band Mumford & Sons, a man for whom the words razor, ironing board and conditioner mean very little. Indeed, the basis of the Mumford appeal is their cider-stained tweed and I-smell-like- I've-been-doing-an-Irish-jig-for- two-days aesthetic. But, according to reports, Mulligan is besotted, and is enjoying her time off before appearing in The Great Gatsby as his chief groupie, following him to the Mumford heartlands of Buckinghamshire, the Orkney Isles and Shepherd's Bush.

Do we detect a trend? What with porcelain-skinned beauty Rosamund Pike throwing her lot in with perennial hell-raiser Robie Uniacke, 50 (a former heroin addict and City speculator who is famous for leaving the house without having gone to bed or changed his clothes), the answer is yes. Forget pretty boys, the new kings of desire are the Mingers. It is easy to see why - the Minger's devil-may-care attitude to personal hygiene suggests that while his peacock friends are busy preening, he is indulging in more life-affirming pastimes such as getting drunk, writing songs, reading poetry, and thinking up hilarious puns with which to amuse lady-friends once the frolics have ceased.

King of the Mingers is, of course, Rhys Ifans, the Welsh scarecrow who has made a career out of inadequately filling a pair of grey Y-fronts (in Notting Hill) and who has a surprising romantic history, dating beauties such as Miller, Kimberly Stewart and now Anna Friel (who clearly has a taste for this sort of thing, given her previous partner and the father of her child is the very characterful actor David Thewlis).

Hot new American novelist Benjamin Hale's book The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (out next month) tells the story of a zoo keeper who falls for her sensitive, intellectual ape. While celeb-rities are yet to go that far, it's clear that what looks good on paper isn't necessarily the thinking woman's ideal. In fact, the more plastic, Botoxed and Identikit the industry of fame becomes, the more we yearn for a man who doesn't get through a bottle of Acqua di Parma a week. Think of the young British star Andrew Garfield, with his gawky frame and Roman profile - borderline beautiful, borderline odd-looking - but still top of the casting directors' list to play Spiderman.

The appeal of a chap with hips thinner than yours and a wild mass of hair that looks as if it may have things living in it is not to be underestimated. At a Channel 4 party in the vaults under London Bridge a few years ago, a seemingly mad but nonetheless mesmerising man engaged me in a conversation about poetry and rambling walks on Hampstead Heath. He plied me with champagne while declining any himself on the grounds of his 'crack-cocaine addiction', and we swapped mobile numbers. Later, when I Googled my prospective dinner date, a very funny, extremely intense young comedian by the name of Russell Brand popped up. As my mother, peering over my shoulder as I clicked, pointed out, 'He looks like a serial killer' (she is of the generation that regards Roger Moore as the pinnacle of masculine beauty). But this was not why I cancelled our planned dinner at the Electric, where he had promised 'food, conversation, charm... as is the convention'. It was plain old flu. I declined his offer 'to play nursie', and a few weeks later he was snapped tumbling out of Kate Moss's house at dawn. Then after that he checked into a clinic for sex addiction. He is now married to the glamazon Katy Perry. Long live the Minger! ES