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Monday, December 14, 2009 

The political zzz factor.

Sunder Katwala tries hard convincing us that even if Simon Cowell attempts to do for politics what the X Factor has done for music then it will be an ignominious failure:

Simon Cowell might do better than that - but not too much better.

If he wants some issue-based current affairs debate, that's fine. But the push-button democracy element on knife crime and Afghanistan strategy is slightly harder to envisage.

If he wants to know why it might not quite work out, he might find that a box-set of the BBC's Amazing Mrs Pritchard or a quick chat with people's champion John Smeaton might help.

Cowell has though done remarkably for a man who himself has no discernible talent - except for being able to spot when someone can do a slightly better up-market karaoke version of a song than a fellow competitor - much like a lot of politicians, really. Perhaps we should just accept the inevitable and allow the most popular man in the country (both in numbers of viewers and number of participants to his show) to become prime minister and be done with it. After all, isn't that how democracy works?

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