During the Attlee government's first eighteen months in office, before the 1947 fuel crisis appeared to make a mockery of its claims of foresight and efficiency, the word ‘planning’ was still a great political trump card for Labour. On the one hand, economic circumstances were such that the need for a fair measure of government involvement in resource allocation during the transition from war to peace was pretty much undeniable. On the other, the Conservative opposition was conveniently split between those who favoured pure free enterprise and put all government failures down to planning, and the ‘me too-ers’ who argued that all the government's problems were due to the fact that it was not planning sufficiently vigorously. The Labour Party had, it might have seemed, an historic opportunity to divide and plan. But, even as the government made dramatic progress on other fronts in this early period, it did not do so in the sphere of planning. Even contemporaries, in their most optimistic recollections, were subsequently hesitant to claim that ‘serious’ economic planning took place before 1947. This was not the perception at the time, however. Paradoxically, ministers failed to plan at least in part because they assumed that planning was already taking place. The government's boldness in other spheres, such as nationalisation and social policy, together with the continuance of controls and the persistence of full employment, helped convince them that somehow it must be.