Simon Cowell brings his insight to bear

Simon Cowell has brought the weight of his experience making Gareth Gates a star to give his opinion on Britney's VMA experience.

She wasn't very good, he says. See? That's the sort of insight you could only get from a professional.

"If I had been looking after Britney I’d have taken one look at her in rehearsals and I wouldn’t have allowed her on stage."

Although, surely, the problem was lack of rehearsal, and her management not being able to get her in the right place at the right time?

“The problem she has now is that she could have killed her career. It’s difficult to come back from that performance, for a while at least."

Not that he's hedging his bets. He'd have made a great doctor: "I'm sorry, your husband is dead. At the moment, anyway."

“If she had turned up and given that performance at the X Factor auditions then I wouldn’t have put her through to the next round."

We love the way that "getting through a round on the X Factor" is being used here as if it's some sort of assay unit of musical quality. Louis Walsh pops up, too:

He said: “Britney wouldn’t make it through one audition of X Factor because she can’t sing live.”

In other words: the X Factor would have rejected the woman who made Oops I Did It Again and Toxic in favour of Shayne Ward. There would be your "price of everything, value of nothing" right there, then.