When Jon and Tracy Morter created a Facebook campaign to challenge Simon Cowell’s monopoly on the Christmas number one single, they did more than just engage an online community to make a point, they mobilized an army. With support from celebrity Twitterers (like comedian and writer Peter Serafinowicz) and no little media interest, more than half a million copies of Rage Against the Machine’s 1992 hit ‘Killing in the Name’ were sold in the week to Sunday 20 December.

The primary aim had been to make the point that not everyone cares about The X Factor TV show and that the now annual claim to the UK Christmas number one single was not alone the preserve of Simon Cowell’s elective and commercially motivated whim.

Viewers and lovers of Cowell’s yearly popularity contest feel that it is an all-conquering force. Intellectual incendiary devices such as “So, what do you think about what Cheryl said to Dannii last night??” have replaced talk of the weather as the UK’s favourite watercooler tittle-tattle. And there’s nothing wrong with that since, for one thing, we don’t get to vote for the weather.

Yet even for its record-breaking finale last week, an admittedly impressive 19 million viewers tuning in still amounts to less than one-third of the nation. Two out of three people don’t watch it. Many more don’t than do, in fact.

Those that did chose to tune in to the final of The X Factor saw likeable 18-year-old Geordie Joe McElderry win the public vote. As is customary, Joe was then handed an inoffensive and unremarkable pop song to cover before less than five per cent of those viewers rushed out to buy it.

Cowell recently sent waves of horror across the nation when, whilst being inexplicably interviewed by Kirsty Wark on Newsnight, he suggested that he could use his format’s popular appeal to conduct informal referenda on polemical political issues (’If you want to see the death penalty restored, press the RED button now…’). In fairness to Simon Cowell, he rarely puts a stacked heel wrong but he confuses the public vote with public opinion.

When another BBC heavyweight current affairs vehicle, Question Time, invited BNP leader Nick Griffin onto the panel the outpouring was as widespread as it was unnecessarily worthy. Griffin, for all his reprehensible rhetoric, had been fairly elected via a public vote but opinion - from a lazy majority who, in their own words, couldn’t be arsed to vote - remained stacked against him and his party’s ideology.

Likewise young Joe McElderry. It went to a public vote, which he won, so the public must want to see him at number one, right? The public had other ideas.

Jon and Tracy Morter had organized a similar campaign twelve months earlier but the re-sales of Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up had barely bothered the top 100. In the post-Big Brother age, something more subversive - something uglier - was needed to prove that you don’t need to be a drunk-with-money fame-hungry music mogul to arbitarily select a song, seemingly at random, and make it number one at Christmas.

That the Morter’s chose Rage Against the Machine and ‘Killing in the Name’ is, on one hand, neither here nor there since the point being made was that ANY song can be plucked at random and sent to number one. Yet, RATM’s very name suggests sticking it to ‘da man’ and the repeat-to-fade flagship lyric - ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’ - makes a more simplistic and direct counterpoint to chief prefab scout Simon Cowell.

Cowell had assumed that so many people cared about The X Factor that he could get a song to number one every Christmas for the rest of time. That he may sell as many as half a million singles in doing so was an impressive aside. Except, this Christmas. This year, The X Factor caused the nation to buy a total of more than one million copies of the two main contenders songs.

Does Joe McElderry deserve a Christmas number one single? No. That Simon Cowell believes McElderry’s ‘hard work’ is justification enough to earn one of just 70 or so Christmas number one’s in Cowell’s lifetime shows just how little the mogul values the prize.

He was right about one thing though, we do care about The X Factor and much more than we thought. Just look at this week’s number one single if you want the proof.

If you disagree, press the RED button now.