His Grace hesitated before posting on this apparently utterly trivial and relatively unimportant matter, lest his august blog of intelligent and erudite comment upon matters religio-political be mistaken for Watchdog.His readers and communicants will know more on Thursday about why this matter is of any concern to him at all.
Especially since Ms Widdecombe is not a contestant.
The X-Factor innovation for this year's interminable two-month eternity of Saturday night musical mediocrity is that all of its performance tracks every week would be immediately available for download on iTunes.
No matter how desperately bad or embarrassingly awful the act, if you happen to like the offering, you may download it within hours of the show for the bargain price of 99p; 98p of which goes directly to fund Simon Cowell's third private jet and subsidise the servants in his fifth $22million mansion in Beverly Hills.
His Grace is of the opinion that this development is Mr Cowell's rather clever response to the success last year of the Cromwellian 'Rage Against The Machine' depriving Mr Cowell of his divine right - the Christmas No1 slot.
But it has been decided that the weekly X-Factor performance tracks are not eligible for the official UK singles chart, despite being sold via iTunes, the reason being to 'protect integrity'.
Whilst His Grace (along with millions of others) may thank God for this relief, the decision raises certain ethical issues relating to the music market.
The concern is that, for the first time in its history, iTunes is determining what is of an acceptable quality for the UK charts; that is to say, they are 'censoring' tracks, irrespective of their popularity, to ensure that they cannot enter the charts.
Where does this end?
Or what precedent is being set?
If the powers-that-be at iTunes were, for example, to determine that 'Killing in the Name' compromised the integrity of the Christmas chart, would they somehow disqualify it from entry irrespective of its download popularity?
And by what creative reasoning is that which might compromise the integrity of the chart during October and November suddenly determined, on 11th December, to be consistent with the desire to 'preverve integrity', in order that the X-Factor televised that week might 'influence' in the following week the popularity and sales of the climactic Christmas release?
Do 'Mistletoe & Wine' and 'Saviour's Day' preserve their chart integrity criteria, while 'Mr Blobby' compromises it?
Or, God forbid, vice versa?
The omnipotent and absolute divine right of Simon Cowell has now been irrevocably fused with the unaccountable and immovable oligarchy of iTunes.
Their control is complete.
His Grace finds himself torn between thanking God that we are to be spared two long months of plastic karaoke covers in the charts, but despairing of what this might mean for democratic protest.
But His Grace will go with the principle every time.
