The Times of London weighs in...(On Kate's side!)
A model's role is not as a role model
Alex O'Connell
The police appeal to Kate Moss is a publicity stunt: bringing this sensible mother to heel is a waste of time
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THEY HAVE YET to rip out her page from the 2006 Pirelli calendar and pin it to an oak tree on Primrose Hill with WANTED written on the top in Magic Marker, but the “shamed” Kate Moss is now a modern outlaw. No, I expect the calendar is still intact on the walls of the mess room in New Scotland Yard.
But now the supermodel — like a rebel skater who has spent 66 minutes on an ice rink after paying for only a single hour’s cold fun — has had her number called in on the megaphone. Earlier this week, in what can only be seen as a flagrant attempt at self-publicity, the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Tarique Gaffur made an appeal to Moss to come home to Daddy.
“I’m appealing to Kate to come back and give her side of the story,” he told
The Sun, after three months of leaving her to it. Never mind PC Plod, we’re talking PC Ground-to-a-standstill.
So, to recap on the western (or West London) saga: the supermodel has been “hiding out” in America since September when
those pictures, taken on a secret camera, were published. The grainy shots showed her apparently chopping up lines of cocaine with her boyfriend at that time, the smashed Maris Piper of a rock star Pete Doherty, and his similarly mashed-up cohorts. She was not arrested at the time and the Metropolitan Police have said that they have no intention of extraditing her.
Sir Iain Blair, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, told
The Mirror in September that he had been personally instrumental in launching an investigation into the paper’s allegations. “We have to look at the impact of this kind of behaviour on impressionable young people and, if there is evidence, something should be done about it,” he roared.
What is being done is that, months later, the assistant commissioner has put on his serious voice. If Kate was short for Katherine, he’d have hollered her full name up the stairs until the sound reached the peaks of Aspen, Colorado, where Moss has been skiing with her new boyfriend.
“It is very important that she comes back to assist us with this investigation. We hope that Kate will give us her version of events. It is in her interests and everybody’s interests that she do this as soon as possible,” Mr Gaffur pleaded. In the interests of
Heat magazine’s front cover and everyone’s entertainment, presumably.
I admire Kate Moss. Not because she’s a bright, charming, determined lady with Heaven’s eyes and a Croydon mouth, which she is. Nor because I am a closet champion of cocaine- taking: I’m not — it turns people into monstrous bores, enchains the poor and makes the rich nastier.
What thrills me most is her old-style Hollywood guts, her utter determination not to let her beautiful irregular-heartbeat-reading of a private life be moulded into the perfect soap opera-storyline arc.
Even the fellow famous expected Moss to conform. “I understand that she has apologised and is changing her life and I think that that is the most important thing” — Sharon Stone’s po-faced attempt at sisterliness.
When did we all become so boringly catholic? We don’t want real irreverence from our stars any more (unless it’s swiftly followed by four Hail Marys in a red tops-sponsored confessional). We want rags to riches, the fall into bad company, the public revelation, the personal admission, the apology and promise of recovery, the recovery, the fall back into the bad and so on. Just look at the vultures cheering as Charles Kennedy squeezed his own complicated life into the first half of a potentially perfect arc this week with his very public admission of an alcohol problem. Just look at the eight million viewers cheering as the
Celebrity Big Brother contestants cheapen themselves by committing the utterly predictable.
Kate Moss is clever and classy enough to know the power of silence, like a matinee idol who understands that the flutter of an eyelash is often enough. Sure, Moss apologised, but with the airiness of the comedian Catherine Tate and her “unbovvered” alter ego. Then, rather than visiting the boys in blue, hiding her head under a Cath Kidston eiderdown and being pictured playing hopscotch with her three-year-old daughter Lila Grace, she refused to participate in the classic redemption story. Instead, she matter-of-factly rode into rehab, lassoed herself some work in the States, ditched Doherty and found herself a new man, Jamie Burke, a pal of the son of that fellow irreverent, Richard Branson.
You see, I imagine there’s nothing that makes a middle-aged assistant commissioner more frustrated than a rich, young, entirely self-supporting mother and alleged offender, enjoying herself with a man 12 years her junior in good snow. This is the real taboo.
Still, Moss may be able to look after herself, but what about her daughter? The model protects Lila Grace from the spotlight by rarely allowing them to be photographed together. This, of course, bolsters the argument that she is a distant mother. But I refuse to believe that her decision to check in to a rehab clinic in Arizona, and so miss her daughter’s third birthday party, was anything other than selfless. She had sensibly considered that it was better for her daughter to have a responsible mother with earning potential to look forward to than a sick mother turning up with a party bag and a headful of trouble. It was a mature act.
How would a tardy prosecution help now, other than to affect Moss’s income (which might affect Lila Grace), keep the story in the news and make Moss’s toadish prosecutors feel less jealous of her exciting life. Yet she has been utterly dignified throughout. Not that she has to be. The role-model argument, put forward by Sir Iain Blair and Tessa Jowell — the latter saying, “It is important to remember that in public life you are a role model, for better or worse” — is a colossal breach of logic. We look up to Moss in life as well as on the runway, so she should behave like a well-trained labrador? Do people really think that if they took drugs and hung out with the slobbering lead singer of Babyshambles that they would be groovy, thin and walleted? Politicians are role models, the police are role models; models . . . wear clothes. Well, some of the time. The legislators and the police, both to blame, should begin the new year with a good old steam iron of the drugs laws before exposing their creases on the catwalk.