This has always been a highly contentious issue and one that will forever live as perfect example of politicians interfereing in matters they have no conception of. They, and their advisors, make crass decisions that make or break a country or, indeed, the industries within it. Those that are power hungry are worse than any of the idiots who call themselves politicians.
Those with power, like Mountbottom as BEAgle calls him, I suspect because he doesn't like using his name in the same breath as TSR2, was a perfect example of a power hungry, toffee nosed aristocrat who used his position to abuse the system one way or another but always for his own ends. A Commander he wasn't, and proved it with his disastrous raid on Dieppe and then persauded those who questioned his integrity and wisdom which cost so many uneccessary lives, that it was "worth the trip" to test the German defences. But who but a bloody clown would dare send tanks on to a shingle beach with cliffs in their faces? Crass stupidity. A track laying vehicle cannot cope with soft shingle like that at Dieppe but he ignored the advice given to him.
Then we get to TSR2. He thought that he could save the Royal Navy buy belittling TSR2 and daring to say to Australia, you can have five of these (F-111's) for one of them(TSR2) - another crass example of his stupidity when trying to be a politician.
He cost this country dear and used his grandiose position as a platform to enhance his own self importance I refuse to mention Burma but I will mention that he proved to be a fool as Viceroy of India so maybe it was, at last, that someone stood up to him and bought him home.
The end to his life is not one I would wish on anyone but it did somehow seem a strange end for a man who would have expected the grandest of the grand. That he didn't get it does have a sense of justice I fancy. But then who am I to say.
I loved TSR2 and it will always be that its cancellation was a huge mistake. Why is it that the aircraft industry has been consistently destroyed by politicians who wouldn't know one end an aeroplane from the other!