The karaoke wizard is dead. Long live the karaoke Sauron. Barely three months ago, Lost in Showbiz declared Simon Cowell a sort of reality TV Oz, a fearsome public presence who is in fact a diminutive man behind a curtain, working the levers of public taste with a mixture of enthusiastic opportunism and gnawing inner despair at how easy it is.

Yet in light of new information – that historically cynical vote for John and Edward last Sunday, and Forbes magazine's estimation that he earned between $75m and $80m from his American TV work alone last year – Simon's status has now been upgraded. Picture him as Sauron in the Second Age. Not yet "wholly evil", as ­ Tolkien pointed out, though disturbingly adept at "corrupting other minds". "He made himself a great king in the midst of the earth," ran the Lord of the Rings author's premonition of the X Factor overlord, "and was at first well-seeming and just and his rule was of benefit to all men in their needs of the body; for he made them rich, whoso would serve him. But those who would not were driven into the waste places . . . "

Eventually, of course, Cowell will resemble Sauron well into the Third Age, possibly shedding his corporeal form and appearing simply as a vast, unblinking eye – "that horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable".

It was the moment that Simon Cowell – and the public – had been waiting for. The X-Factor's self-styled Mr Nasty, and the one judge who had heaped constant criticism onto Dublin-born twins John and Edward Grimes in every single show, finally had his chance to kick them into touch last Sunday. So when Cowell failed to eliminate the teenage singing sensation from Cardiff, known to their growing army of fans as "Jedward", the horrified look on his fellow judges' faces said it all. Was it a fleeting moment of madness on Cowell's part – or simply another step in his grand plan to make even more money?

Simon Cowell might have voted to eliminate Lucie as a threat to his surviving acts in the competition. He might have voted because of the headlines the twins generate for the show. He might have voted realising that the very fact of his endorsing John and Edward would tarnish their underdog status, thus ensuring the public see them off at their earliest convenience. He might have voted specifically to enrage the public, given his earlier criticism of the twins, allowing him to declare in a few months "the public was right, I have begun to think more like a producer than a judge", thus finessing his inevitable decision to step down from judging duties on the British version of The X Factor, in order to graduate to the American iteration thereof, which is scheduled to launch next year.

If the week has taught us anything, it is that Simon is the man who can make you breathe "my God, that was cynical" while you are watching The X Factor, despite the fact you already know it to be a show whose terrifying, futurist engines run on cynicism, and whose vast subterranean galleys are staffed by production slaves whose first principle is "what is literally the most cynical thing we could possibly do now, because we must scrap that and double it?"

Love him or loathe him, Cowell has us all in his thrall. The kettle is boiled during Louis Walsh and Dannii Minogue's critiques, but nobody misses what Mr Nasty has to say after each song. According to fellow judge Walsh, "a contestant can get great feedback from Cheryl, Dannii and me, but in reality the only opinion they care about is Simon's".

The X Factor 2009 - John and Edward