Cheryl Cole gets away with murder on the X Factor, says Louis Walsh

Louis Walsh has said his fellow X Factor judge Cheryl Cole “gets away with murder” on the show.

Last week Cheryl accused the veteran judge of deliberately voting against her contestant Laura White as a “revenge” move after Cheryl helped eliminated his two out of three of his acts in the first fortnight of the live shows. Last week, Cheryl is said to have hit the roof backstage after Louis chose Dannii Minogue’s Ruth Lorenzo over Laura because he felt she was more of a “battler”.

Louis told the People newspaper: “I did NOT do it to spite Cheryl. Cheryl has two girls already through. What did she want? Three girls in the bloody final!

“If Cheryl had her way, she thinks it’s going to be handed to her on a plate because it’s her first year in X Factor. She gets away with murder. But it’s the public who control the show.”

“In the auditions [Laura] was very promising, she is a very good singer but she didn’t improve.

“I thought Cheryl’s choice of song for Laura was a disaster. It was Mariah Carey week and she gave Laura the Lionel Richie song ‘Endless Love’ and put her behind the piano. She sounded atrocious, it’s as simple as that.”

“My job is to decide on the night who performs well and who doesn’t. That’s all I’ve done here. Ruth far out-performed Laura on the night.

“That’s why I voted how I did - and I can’t understand why there’s now all this fuss.

“It’s always like this, we [the judges] are all very competitive. We all want our acts to win, I’m in it for the long haul with [his remaining group] JLS.

“Cheryl is a very good judge. She is very competitive but we get on fine behind closed doors.

“She wants to win this year. [But] the music business is not easy, nobody said it was easy.

“The thing about the show is that it is real - nobody knows what is going to happen. You have to be prepared to take criticism, it’s a very tough business. If you give it out you have to be prepared to take it back.

“That’s what me and Simon do and then we laugh about it.”

Last night saw two of Dannii’s contestants in the bottom two - Rachel Hylton and Daniel Evans - with Daniel ultimately voted off.