Remember, it's a competition between the judges as well as the contestants... Right from the auditions, the strongest category was quite clearly the u-30 girls, with the over-30s close second.

Cowell is mentoring the over-30s, meaning the biggest threats to his producing a winner were the girls in Dannii's group... and guess who've gone? Over the last couple of weeks, he has simply made a lowest-common-denominator calculation about the likely public vote result, and then abstained from making a decision on the basis that in each case the contestant with the talent to threaten his 3 mentees will lose, and then he won't have to take the blame for their being kicked out:

Lloyd v Rachel: Obvious that Lloyd would be saved. Cheryl cried, and he was ill. Double sympathy vote. Even without that, he'd have been saved by public vote anyway, since despite being vocally excruciatingly boring, he has the cute puppy-dog eyes beloved of grandmas and tweeny-boppers alike. The give away about that one was that Cowell so obviously knew that Rachel had more talent - and had been saying so throughout - so if it really was a talent contest, he would have done what he is supposedly being paid to do, made the talent-based judgement and saved Rachel. Especially as she'd been getting better and better each week.

JEdward v Lucie: Impossible to avoid the hype about JEdward in the papers, drumming up the votes in their favour. Even though they were in the bottom two, chances were always that they would have more than Lucie, and from the way she was crying before the result was even announced, she knew it too. If she had continued in the competition, she would certainly have been more of a threat to Olly, Danyl or Jamie.

I think that even if Cowell "plays fair" from now on, the next time one of his guys is in the last two, even if it's against JEdward, they're history. Especially if it's down to Danii. This will probably result in the show losing the most talented male singer, Danyl, who has already been in the sing-off once, and is suffering from rubbish song choices.

I'm actually coming round to the view that it would be a good thing if JEdward won, because it would be such an absurd result for a 'novelty act' to win that it might kill off the whole franchise. Although it would be horrible unfair on some other contestants who are genuinely potential stars (in the narrow terms of commercial 'music' anyway), we've now reached the stage where it already has been, so what's to lose?