If I were Kate Moss right now, I’d be pretty vexed at the British press. For nearly a week now, the papers have been full of stories about Moss and her “drug and sex shame” — rather rumly, as Moss doesn’t seem to have any shame about them at all.

I should make it clear right now that I do not condone cocaine abuse. Cocaine is a hugely unethical product: it turns nearly anyone who uses it into an amoral bore and, in most West End venues, it reduces the number of available toilet cubicles to a frankly inadequate one. As both a subscriber to the Ethical Trade Initiative and a sufferer from recurrent attacks of cystitis, I can say that cocaine is truly my enemy.

But really, as bisexual libertine drug addict supermodels who sleep with their friends’ husbands go, Kate Moss has come out of this quite well. Take, for instance, the initial Mirror story (“COCAINE KATE! Supermodel Kate chops out line after line”) that kicked off the whole Moss Gossgate. The feature insisted that this was an account of a “debauched” drink and drugs session. However, if you read the piece, it turned to be an evening where Kate Moss appeared to sit on a chair, drinking, chatting quietly, and, very generously, giving everyone her expensive illegal drugs. Not only that, but Moss was chopping the lines out for her guests with her own fair hands — a hostessy, almost domestic goddessy gesture you would have expected, say, the Mail to appreciate.

As for this being the “end of her career”, the cover — with its novel, grainy, brown and yellow resolution — looked distinctively iconic. Indeed, what better calling card for a model than a front cover where you look hot — despite being up till 5am, off your face? And all while dressed, it seems, as Dick Whittington. It made her seem very, well, professional.

Of equal cause for annoyance for Moss must be the press insistence on what a bad mother she is. Let’s look again at the stories concerned. Moss’s “The Beautiful and the Damned” party, where a “polymorphous orgy” took up the best suite at Claridge’s. Moss’s alleged “lesbian threesome”. The aforementioned “debauched” sitting-on-chairs-and-chatting session. I can’t help but notice that they all happened very late at night, when two-year-olds are, by and large, asleep. Who’s to say that Kate, otherwise naked and high as a kite, didn’t have a Tomy cordless baby monitor propped up in the corner? And that when Lila woke up at 7.30am, Moss stubbed out her ciggie, carefully picked her way across the bodies, and started slopping Rice Krispies into a Fimbles bowl? Besides, anyone who’s got kids knows what it’s like when you get a rare night out. You go a bit crazy. You’re like a — slightly sleepy — sailor on shore leave. Most of us don’t take cocaine and then have lesbian sex, but who’s to say what would happen if either of those facilities were available to the customers of the Railway Arms, N8? I’ve cleared them out of curried nuts before now; and I hate curried nuts.

Of course, you might say that all the allegations against Moss look like the behaviour of someone who is desperately unhappy — someone striving to find meaning and feeling in a life numbed by pressure, consumerism and excess. But personally, I think all celebrity behaviour — appearing on I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!, going to China White, wearing tinselly Julien McDonald dresses that flash your down-belows — is the behaviour of desperately unhappy people. At least Kate Moss was doing all this in private. With her policy of never giving interviews and her admirable motto of “Never complain, never explain”, she’s the one celebrity since Syd Barrett who truly deserves her privacy. And I suspect her only real “drug shame” is when they run out.

Her other motto, equally admirable, is “F*** all the mixers.”

Pretty in mink but in bad odour

Last week’s most exciting diva-clash occurred in New York, when Lady Heather Mills McCartney, protesting over Jennifer Lopez’s continuing use of fur, lost her leg in an ensuing fracas. Alas for fans of silly headlines, J-Lo did not personally divest HMM of her limb, thus facilitating: “J-Lo has Macca’s other half’s calf, to go.”

One interesting fact raised, however, is that the fur-maddened Lopez apparently wears “mink eyelashes”. Surely fur is one of those things — like aggregates, and tar — that one spends the best part of one’s life keeping out of one’s eyes? The biggest question, however, is the vexing issue of what happens when Lopez cries. Have you ever been downwind of a mink farm on a rainy day? The creature would appear to be — judging by its smell in damp conditions — a member of the fox family, but with a musk gland with the size and power of a turkey baster. If Lopez gets upset about anything, a personal assistant is going to have to Febreze her right in the eye.

Penguins lead way

Still in the US, a Christian audience is making a documentary about penguins the biggest factual cinema release since Fahrenheit 9/11. Churches are block-booking seats for March of the Penguins, which is apparently a “condemnation of gay marriage” and puts forward the case for “intelligent design”, ie, Creationism. To be honest, this is good news. If American Christians want to go public on the fact that they’re now morally guided by penguins, at least we know where we all stand.

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