Cinderella knew what she was up to when she dressed up to the nines in borrowed clothes and swanned off to the ball.

She may have been little more than a scullerymaid, but she was out to bag a prince, and she got one. These days you'd find her perched on a bar stool in a Mayfair nightspot such as Pangaea or Boujis, dressed top to toe in Gucci or Cavalli, dripping with designer jewels and quaffing Bollinger at [pound]180 a bottle. Oh, and she'd probably, apparently, be Russian.

Gold diggers seem to be everywhere at the moment. From headlines warning millionaires of Slavic sirens out to grasp their expense accounts, to column inches devoted to mind-boggling divorce settlements. In May, Beverley Charman bagged [pound]48m from her former husband - the biggest divorce award ever. Our fascination with women who hook up with wealthy men is almost endless.

Certainly, whenever a good-looking woman marries a rich man we ask the question: is it love or is she after his money? We all laughed knowingly when comedian Caroline Aherne's Mrs Merton asked Debbie McGee: "So what was it that attracted you to the multi- millionaire Paul Daniels?" The red-tops went into a frenzy when it was revealed that Apprentice contestant Katie Hopkins had slept with and then set up home with her well-off married boss. And poor old Heather Mills McCartney can't seem to put a foot right. These people no doubt married for love, but have continually had to put up with questions.
Advertisement

Recent moves by the Law Commission to give unmarried co-habitees the same financial claims as divorcees in the event of a split were hailed in the press almost gleefully as a gold-digger's charter. So is there a whole new breed of manhunter in town?

"I'm not ashamed to admit that getting married to a wealthy man is my top priority," says Joanna Marie-Clayton, a 27-year old actress and singer from Surrey who is currently working in a care home. "I want to be financially stable and to be able to afford the nice things in life. Frankly, I'm unlikely to achieve that through my own work."

Clayton points out that these days, with the divorce rate so high, considerations such as security are more important than just love. Her dream, she says, is to have a 10-bedroomed house in the country with acres of land and staff to maintain it. "We'd have two or three classic cars - I'd like a Mercedes Kompressor convertible. His and hers would be nice. I'd like lots of dogs, some stables and probably another property in London. I'm not really into designer labels, but it would be nice to be able to buy what I wanted when I wanted. I don't see what's wrong with wanting to meet a man who can provide me with these things - in the past, it was accepted as a woman's duty to make a good marriage and what's so wrong with that?"

The British writer Tasmina Perry, author of the bestseller Daddy's Girls, has chosen gold diggers as the subject of her latest novel, tipped to be this summer's top beach read. "It seemed the right time. There's been a lot of talk in the papers about gold diggers, toxic wives and so on," she says. "Go to restaurants like Cipriani, or Zuma, and they are full of beautiful twentysomething girls on the lookout for a rich man. When I was researching the book, I spoke to a lot of women who were being plied with champagne every night, yet none would admit to being a gold digger. Then, you discover that wealth is at the top of their wish list for a man. So what, I found myself wondering, is the difference between being Cinderella and gold digging? Where do you draw the line?"

The simple answer, of course, is that in these days of equality, women no longer need to marry into money - we can make our own. In a report published last month by Barclays Wealth Management, economists predicted that there will be more female millionaires in the UK than men by the year 2020, and less than one in four of these will have acquired their wealth through marrying a rich man. Yet, persistently, the ones we are really interested in are the ones who have married wealth.

Whole magazines are devoted to the antics of the Wags and young girls are citing Coleen McLoughlin - who, after all, is only famous for being Wayne Rooney's girlfriend - as their role model. They want to be her - and they're realistic enough to know that a good marriage is their best chance.

There are a whole crop of internet sites to assist women in their quest for a wealthy man. Liselle is a beautiful blonde thirtysomething manager on a salary of [pound]20,000. She has joined the dating website Sugardaddie.com to find herself a rich spouse. "For me to seriously consider him, a man would have to be earning [pound]90 to [pound]100k" she says. She believes he'd be getting a bargain - a gorgeous young wife, love, sex and, one day, a family. In return, she would step up into a whole new financial bracket.

Dr Sheila Keegan, a psychologist with the social-research consultancy Campbell Keegan Ltd, believes she has seen a shift in our attitude to the gold digger lately. "Historically, almost the only way for women to get wealthy was to marry well," she says. "Then came the feminist era when women were supposed to do it for themselves, and they despised the dependent woman. But now we seem to be in a post-feminist era when there isn't that worthiness and sensitivity there was in the 1960s and 1970s because equality is just assumed, and on that basis there's more acceptance of women who want to marry a wealthy man."