X Factor changes rules, resets Scotland

You'd have thought that if Simon Cowell was the genius everyone pretends he is, he might have had the idea of changing the format of the X Factor before the first set of rehearsals had been filmed. Now, they're going to have to do the Scottish ones all over again.

Await, now, the inevitable person-through-originally-now-not-getting-through story.

In the Gordon Brown interview for Guardian Weekend - the one where he tried to passive-aggressive away his problems by saying 'I could just walk away tomorrow, I could; no, really' - the Prime Minister's love of Cowell and his end-of-the-pier franchises came up:

And Britain's Got Talent - is it his new favourite TV show? "I think Britain's Got Talent is really interesting. What annoyed me when I was at school was that there were lots of people with obvious ability who could've benefited from opportunities and were told, 'It's not for people like you.' And now they've got more open ways of coming forward. Surely the future for our country is more that Britain has got talent than it is that Britain is a broken society."

What about the judges? Simon Cowell is so nasty. "Do you not think the reason people like him is that he's honest about whether they've got a talent or not?"

Soon, when Gordon is an ex-PM, and people start to sift about for what went wrong, that section might become a key text. Surely, by having a programme called 'Britain's Got Talent', and by having open, public auditions for shows like the X Factor, Cowell is doing the very opposite of "being honest": the format claims, falsely, that everyone is in with a chance.

To hold out an offer of hope, and then to crush it away in the coldest, most snide way possible, leaving people with their confidence in tatters, their dreams of a better future ruined, and the sense of having been very publicly humiliated is a horrible thing indeed. And then turning round, after doing that consistently since 1997, and saying that you like Britain's Got Talent as well is unforgivable.