King bachelor Clooney at the end of his reign

The news of film star George Clooney's engagement to London lawyer Amal Alamuddin has triggered a Mexican wave of despair across the Western World. For Clooney is that rare thing: the objectified male - admired by men and women alike, albeit women making up the more hysterical part. Men want to be him; women be with him, even if only for one night (and, in fact, some of the chaps feel rather similarly).

Clooney, just short of his 53rd birthday, is a bona fide star of the old-school variety, and a significant element of this appeal is his eternal bachelor status. Wed once in the dim and distant past to one Talia Balsam - a woman whose name sounds suspiciously as if he invented it based on his shampoo - he had subsequently declared himself to be not the marrying kind. And that's just the way we, the slavering public, liked him. In being no one's husband, he could be everybody's favourite fantasy.

And so it came to pass that the Las Vegas outpost of Madame Tussaud's boasted a "Marrying George Clooney" photo opportunity, in which visitors could don a wedding frock and stand next to a waxen statue of the actor clad in a tuxedo; a cult tourist attraction not merely for the girls.

For who among us remembered the original Gorgeous George (American wrestler George Wagner), after the advent of Le Clooney? It is something to do with that smile: an easy, open, self-effacing grin-plus-requisite-twinkle that makes man, woman and child alike think: "Oh, that's all right, then." Even those previously unaware of their status as Neoplatonists could understand that this beatific masculine pulchritude was somehow a reflection of all that was good in the universe.

As with so many an objectified female star, adulation also required a hairstyle. Clooney laboured for a good 15 years in a big-hair wilderness that carried him no nearer fame than a role in 1998's Return of the Killer Tomatoes. It was a seminal new haircut that brought him his breakthrough part as Dr God's Gift (technically: Doug Ross) in the 90s sex and scrubs drama ER. A big-screen presence followed, in which he cornered the market in easy, open, self-effacing-grin-plus-requisite-twinkle type roles.

For an indisputably dashing chap, Clooney has maintained a pleasing lack of vanity, as anyone who witnessed his tubby, flip-flop running as the cuckolded hero in 2011's acclaimed The Descendants can testify. A run-in with Bell's Palsy as a teen, failed baseball career, two false starts at university, and the aforementioned pre-ER hair atrocity seem to have kept him grateful and grounded.

Meanwhile, his innate personality - itself not an attribute shared by many Hollywood denizens - would appear to be of the good egg variety. He is evidently in possession of a brain, a hinterland, is universally liked in addition to being adored. An altruist as he is an activist, Clooney is famously concerned: about voting, about the Democrat cause, about Darfur, Haiti, the Sudan. Given a wrong, he is keen to right it, even if it means getting banged up for his cause, as he was in 2012, when he was arrested outside the Sudanese Embassy for civil disobedience.

A stalwart champion of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights, he will not "do a Jason Donovan" and deign to deny rumours about his own hotly and heavily debated sexuality. Instead, he has asserted: "The last thing you'll ever see me do is jump up and down, saying, 'These are lies!' That would be unfair and unkind to my good friends in the gay community. I'm not going to let anyone make it seem like being gay is a bad thing." If he is closeted - this not only adds to his old school, leading-man appeal - it is a very contemporary kind of closet, door insouciantly ajar, details the business of no one.

Meanwhile, there is the ostensibly strenuous heterosexuality, closely documented by the world's tabloids. Previous Clooney arm candy include: British model Lisa Snowdon, former wrestler Stacy Keibler, cocktail waitress and "reality personality" Sarah Larson, Italian actress Elisabetta Canalis and Baywatch starlet Krista Allen. A friend of a friend, who received the benefit of his, ahem, attentions, rapturously recalls that it was the single most erotic night of her life.

And there Clooney transcendently hovers: the great 21st-century dashing / modest / concerned / gay / straight / bisexual / universal fantasy of all men and women, beaming bachelorishly, and thus forever availably, away in the global imagination. Until now. Worse, Ms Alamuddin seems just the kind of perfect woman who would ensnare such an elusive paragon: being bright first, beautiful second.

And, what a beauty - with a lavish, natural loveliness of the sort to make La-La Land's plastic people only weep, were they able. Fluent in French and Arabic, and now working out of London's Doughty St Chambers, she specialises in international law, human rights, extradition and crime. Previously, she served as an adviser to former UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan, now special envoy to Syria, a subject close to her fiance's heart.

Alamuddin, 36, and once voted "hottest barrister in London", issues from a family of prominent Lebanese intellectuals, who fled warring Beirut when she was a child to settle in Buckinghamshire. Her father is business academic Ramzi Alamuddin, her mother the celebrated journalist Baria Alamuddin, foreign editor of the Lebanese newspaper Al Hayat. After leaving St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she gained a 2:1 in law, she studied at the New York University School of Law, before returning to Blighty where she is at once the very model of hard graft and a much sought-after party guest.

Earlier this year, a former colleague of Clooney's informed People magazine: "He's with someone who is a very accomplished attorney. She isn't someone who is pursuing a career in acting or entertainment. She's on his level." Some might argue that she occupies a rather dizzier perch.

Regardless, without Gorgeous George, who will fulfil the necessary function of universal bachelor? Johnny Depp has proceeded straight from one long-term relationship into a hurtle towards marriage. Leonardo DiCaprio may be a "modeliser", but he pursues these clothes horses in the listless and desultory fashion of a man defeated. Meanwhile, in the potential-to-be-lusted-after stakes, he has evolved straight from snivelling sub-aqua waif to he of giant jowls, with no intermediate period. And I cannot be the only individual to fail to distinguish between the various Ryans.

No, if I had to put my money on any bachelor carrying off the Clooney crown, it would be Cameron Diaz. At 41, the actress is acute of cheekbone, pert of pout, fit as a flea, not given to breeding or co-dependency of any sort, keen on men, yet open to the idea of being keen on women, witty, intelligent, socially engaged, widely liked, and clearly something of a gas.

Meanwhile, however much one wishes the happy couple well, one senses this may not be the end of the romantic road for The Cloon. After all, this is a man adept at fantasy, narrative, at keeping balls forever circling in the air.

And, reader, I assure you, this is not merely wishful thinking.