By this point, the postwar Labour government, headed by Clement Attlee, had implemented dramatic budget cuts in various areas, which may have provided an inducement for the cancellation of the M.52, which was projected to involve considerable cost. According to Wood, "the decision not to go ahead was purely a political one made by the Attlee Government". In February 1946, around the same time as the termination of the M.52's development, Frank Whittle resigned from Power Jets, stating that this was due to his disagreement with official policy. At the point of cancellation, the first of the three M.52s had been 82 per cent completed and it had been scheduled to commence the first test flights within only a few months. The test programme would have involved the progressive testing and development of the M.52 by the RAE, initially without reheat installed. The ultimate aim of the tests would have been to have achieved Mach 1.07 by the end of 1946. Miles made a last ditch attempt to revive the project, submitting a proposal for a single near-complete M.52 prototype to be outfitted with a captured German rocket engine and automated controls, eliminating the requirement for a pilot to be on board. However, this proposal was rejected. Due to the project falling under the Official Secrets Act, the existence of the M.52 was unknown to the wider British public; thus, neither the nation nor the world knew that a supersonic aircraft had nearly been built, nor of its unceremonious termination. The Ministry repeatedly refused to allow Miles to hold press conferences on the M.52 and, while conducting its own press conference on the topic of high-speed flight on 18 July 1946, the Ministry made no mention of the project at all. It wasn't until September 1946 that the Ministry allowed Miles to announce the existence of the M.52 and its cancellation. Upon the announcement of the M.52's existence, there was a huge amount of press interest in the story, who pressured the government to provide more detail on the cancellation. A spokesman for the Ministry of Supply eventually commented on the topic, suggesting that other approaches had been suggested by later research that were being pursued in place of the M.52. According to Wood, the response from the Ministry was "a complete smokescreen...it was unthinkable to admit that supersonic expertise was non-existent." Lockspeiser's role in cancelling the M.52 became public knowledge, leading to his decision being derided in the press as "Ben's blunder".