Promising but only a winner thanks to a well-timed summer release

They got it wrong, of course. They always do. Despite a brace of excellent singles, Niomi Daley, aka Ms Dynamite's A Little Deeper isn't the best album from the British Isles this year, and certainly won't be the best album that Daley ever makes.

The very timing of the award – as ever, at the end of the summer – always makes it likely that outdoors friendly pop music with a certain contemporary edge (and Daley has rightly received acclaim for her snappy and opinionated lyrics) can come from nowhere to win the big cheque.

Yet the general critical consensus on its original release was "promising but the best is yet to come".

Not that it matters. The Streets may have been the hottest favourites since Liverpool played Wimbledon in some distant cup final, but the judging format, which encourages argument to the last moment (and let's face it, no one can keep a pointless debate going like some music writers in dispute) at least throws up the unexpected. This year's nominations featured so many worthy if unrealised debut efforts that it was more of a lottery than usual.

If only Mercury Communications, or whatever the company was called, was still around to pick up the kudos. Though the prize has in fact been sponsored by Panasonic for a few years now, the defunct telecommunications firm receives a ghostly plug every year. Their bosses might not have known how to run a business all that well, but someone in the PR department certainly knew what they were doing.

In fact the shadow prize, The People's Mercury (see how it lives?), voted for by Radio One listeners, went to Roots Manuva's Run Come Save Me, the oldest record on the list, which shows the public learns to love its music better with time.

Perhaps what we really need is a Mercury Singles Prize. Ash versus Sugababes, Kylie versus the Datsuns (if we're including the Commonwealth). Just imagine the companion compilation.