Trust a Tory to try and ruin something pure and joyful by wiping their grubby paws all over it. When Skepta won the 2016 Mercury Prize, Conservative Culture Minister Matt Hancock tweeted his congratulations, and told the Mirror that he and his team listened to Skepta "in the back of the ministerial car"—although he was unable to name a single track on Konnichiwa, amusingly. He spun the news as a triumph of Thatcherite values: "Grime represents modern Britain… the entrepreneurial, go-getting nature. It speaks that wherever you come from, you can make it."
But not even this desperate lunge for the bandwagon could sour an almost perfect redemption story for the genre over the last two years. Just when it seemed like Britain's final big pirate radio sound had spluttered its last, it came back stronger than ever before. Grime's revival and meteoric rise since 2014 has been as unexpected as it has been overwhelming. It's been hailed as a proudly British triumph by the same cultural gatekeepers and politicians who spent years blaming its protagonists for urban unrest and social and moral decay. Even prior to Skepta's Mercury win, the scene's resurgence had been deemed newsworthy in its own right by Channel 4 and BBC News at Six – "It's bold, it's British, and it's taking the world by storm," was Sophie 'Merkage' Raworth's introduction. In March, Radio 1 head honcho Chris Price suggested grime could become the UK's next "big cultural export... our hip-hop," adding that the world suddenly seemed to be watching.
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