It was Ted Heath’s government that introduced the first price freezes in November 1972. As The Grocer reported at the time: “watchdog officials were set up to man ‘dial a fiddle’ phones in Whitehall, a minister of food prices was appointed, and the nation was called on to rush around trying to catch out shopkeepers.” And even though the so-called Price Commission continued under the 1974 Labour government, it was a dead duck long before Margaret Thatcher abolished price controls in 1979.