Kate stays away from UK

For three months she has successfully avoided awkward questions about the drug abuse claims which threatened to wreck her career.

Now it has emerged that Kate Moss still has no formal plans to return to Britain to face the Scotland Yard inquiry into claims that she snorted 'line after line' of cocaine.

Friends had previously insisted that she would be back in the country by Christmas.

But Miss Moss, who has signed a number of lucrative contracts since the scandal broke, is now likely to stay out of the country over the festive season.

Her decision not to co-operate with the investigation is thought to have been prompted by fears of embarrassing publicity.

Police plan to arrest and interview the 31-year-old under caution in the presence of a solicitor. If she admits taking the drug she is likely to escape with a caution. But that would leave her with a criminal record, making it difficult to find work abroad, particularly in the U.S.

A spokesman for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Unit said: 'If someone has just been arrested and the charges are dropped, they will be okay. But once there is a conviction, that person's status changes. In a word, they will not be allowed in.'

Miss Moss, who has a three-year-old daughter, is renting a house in America where she is filming an advert for Virgin Mobile as part of a £1.2million deal.

Since the scandal broke in September, she has spent a period in drug rehabilitation at the Meadows Clinic in Arizona. But she has continued to work and has been pictured modelling in Spain and the Caribbean.

Although she was ditched by a number of fashion houses after the allegations, her advisers confidently predict her new contracts will maintain her multimillionaire lifestyle. Detectives want to talk to her because they feel she can provide useful information about who is supplying the showbusiness parties where cocaine abuse is rife.

Officers believe young women looking for fame and fortune are being offered free cocaine by good-looking men in their twenties to get them hooked.

Officers, who are being supervised by Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, may even now start reexamining 'non suspicious' drug deaths of young women in London to see if they lead back to the same gangs.