There's an irony, as others have said, about getting the airframes to Cosford, if that's the intention, because in a different era, BA landed a 707 and a 1-11 there plus a few other large airframes were also flown in. However, the VC10 carried out 2, presumably trial approaches, and then went home to Brize before coming back later by road.
Why would there be any irony there? It depends on what the ODM says the stopping distance is in the intended and possible emergency conditions. There is no way that a Tornado can be stopped 'brakes only' at Cosford with any amount of diversion fuel on board. That makes a safe landing contingent on deployment of thrust reverse or engaging an arrestor cable. Systems aren't engineered to the same levels of assurance in combat aircraft as in airliners, and Kandahar 2009 reminded us that while cables may be good enough as a contingency for rare failures or when there's no acceptable operational mitigation, they are not infallible. If the 707 had a good primary and secondary stopping option then all power to its elbow.
If it was all done on the hope that a simplex system worked as intended then I can only point to the steep decline in accident rates per flying hour since the era of such exploits and say that I am not in favour of returning to those days.