Simon Cowell has only one true love On the surface, Cowell takes an amused and detached view of the speculation. Yet from rigorous textual analysis of the Sun serialisation, you strongly suspect that he will never find genuine love, even in the shapeliest of breasts, until genetic science perfects the process of cloning. The vanity and self-adoration are astounding. Forget the Botox injections, colonic irrigation and a weekly half hour attached to a drip feeding his body age-defying nutrients. The detail that leaps out is the pathway towards his Beverly Hills mansion "made up of stones that seem to drift on a stream, giving Cowell... the appearance of walking on water." Another once masterly manipulator of public opinion suffers from a Jesus complex, it strikes me, and Tony Blair seems a useful point of comparison. With the immensely powerful - and it is futile to deny the power of anyone who reduces sentient beings capable of holding down jobs to obsessing about the merits of performing dogs - the grandest question is always the same. What is the motivation? What drives them to acquire the power? What do they want with it? With Cowell, as with Blair, one scratches the head and stammers a nebulous theory about the craving to be worshipped by strangers in a distant, affirmative echo of the worship they lavish on themselves. It must be a lonely life on his vast estate, with its luxury spa, its 7,000-foot lawn paved with Canadian limestone and the £7 million overflow residence (for whom?) up the road, gazing vacantly at his flame-lit waterfall like another impenetrable hollow man, Jay Gatsby, looking over the sea. The more one reads about Cowell the less one learns, almost certainly because there is nothing to know. Leave it long enough to take root, and a personality built on nothing but veneer and affectation becomes the reality. Perhaps the end approaches for the Cowell Dominion, as it did for Mr Blair once he decided that Britain was too insignificant and tried to crack the US. The Cowellite stranglehold on TV audiences, on both sides of the Atlantic, appears to be weakening. Yet it is folly to write him off while he still fascinates so deeply that one cannot read about his preference for black toilet paper - a peculiar choice of hue for reasons plainly unsuited to your breakfast table - without borrowing Metternich's question about Talleyrand's death to ask: "Now what did he mean by that?" There is no answer. The only lesson taught by examining the intimate life of Simon Cowell is the hackneyed old one about ourselves. We remain marooned in a time of such gruesome fin de siècle decadence that Mr Cowell's perplexing taste in loo rolls must, like everything else about him, be analysed for clues to its wider implications as if it were a Supreme Soviet pronouncement at the height of the Cold War. He has long been a sublimely gifted puppeteer - he inveigles you to vote for Matt Cardle one evening, and you awake the next morning wondering, "How the hell did that happen?"; it's like coming round from a drunken one-night stand beside a partner so "coyote ugly" that, were your arm trapped beneath his or her head, you'd chew it off to escape without waking the person up - and perhaps his genius for pulling the strings is finally on the wane. On his behalf, I sincerely hope not. When the public eventually tires of the legerdemain to which it has affectionately turned half a blind eye for years, he will find himself isolated in that vulgar Californian Xanadu, living off curdled memories. And that would put even Citizen Cowell's genuine love of self to an extremely painful test.