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The accusations are flying, politicians are in uproar and there is a real fear that British democracy has been compromised, writes Dan Wainwright.

I am of course not referring in the slightest to the Lisbon treaty but rather to the astonishing survival of John and Edward on the X Factor.

On Sunday the talented Lucie Jones was sent home to Wales in floods of tears despite possessing the one thing that the supposed singing contest is all about – the ability to sing.

Instead of her the bequiffed blonde brothers will spend another week walking on red carpets and having even more rumours about their being the next Ant and Dec (please God no, one of each is enough), getting their own record deal or even being the messiah, returned to Earth for the Second Coming in twin form.

Actually that last one I made up, but there is something apocalyptic about their meteoric rise.

Reality TV is entering a dangerous and unpredictable new age. It all started last year when John Sergeant inexplicably survived a dance contest week after week simply because the public enjoyed winding up the so called experts.

Despite being in the competition to win Sergeant made the very odd move to quit having decided that his own hype just wasn’t worth believing. Given that logic it beggars belief that he even entered in the first place. What did he think would happen?

Now we have the same thing on X Factor. In a repeat of what happened with Rik Waller and Michelle McManus in Pop Idol the public are choosing to vote for the one act that Simon Cowell desperately doesn’t want to win.

But oh how the tables turned on us. Faced with the deciding vote and therefore the chance to put the country out of its misery from seeing Jedward tumble and cartwheel around the stage with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man behind them (and please, pity the poor person who puts that they were Jedward’s backing dancer on their CV), Cowell instead decided to inflict them upon us once more.

It was Reality TV’s ultimate revenge. Cowell has called our bluff. With his smug demeanour in full flow he ordered Dermot O’Leary to refer back to the public vote, used in the event of deadlock thus rendering the entire Sunday hour of X Factor utterly pointless, and sent poor Lucie home.

In that little twinkle in his eye Cowell was saying: “You, people of Britain who think you can outsmart me, you wanted them, well you can damn well keep them.”

Now we must suffer them once more and one cannot even imagine the horrors we will endure. We have already had red catsuits, the Ghostbuster outfits and Rock DJ – twice – I can only speculate that come Saturday they will be clad in full on Chav tracky bottoms, their hair sculpted to look like baseball caps, as they stumble their way through The Streets song Fit But You Know It, or anything that might mean they don’t have to get a note right.

Cowell has played the role of a vengeful parent who has caught his kids – us voters – smoking. Now, in the form of Jedward, he is making us smoke every single one, enduring each awful bum note, until we are utterly sick and promise never to succumb again to the addiction of voting for them.

We, the public, are Cowell’s rebellious children. We all wanted him to love us, like he did Leona Lewis, but all he did was sneer as we sang I Will Always Love You. So we acted out. And now we are punished. We have tasted our own medicine and it is bitter.