When Virgin took over they stated to the effect that they would be focussing on long haul feed.
I am not really buying that. Flybe has 70+ or so aircraft. Virgin has its long-haul base at LHR and LGW. It is virtually impossible to shift any decent number of airframes to routes that would feed those hubs simply because there are no slots available at any of those airports that would allow a decent hub-and-spoke operation with suitably timed slots. So unless Virgin massively beefs up its small Manchester longhaul operation and adds more Flybe routes to MAN, how can they repurpose Flybe to a longhaul feeder?