All this talk of conspiracy suggests that TSR2 was nothing other than a job creation scheme that got too expensive, even for the Labour government of the day - or am I just being provocative?
Provocative? Maybe a little...
Nobody above used the conspiracy word did they...? though there
was a book published soon after, 'The Murder of the TSR-2', that perhaps did. One of the few books published in this country that the govt. attempted to remove from bookshops - the copy I read had the whole of the summary on the inner dust-covers overprinted with heavy
xxxxx's.... By Order, HM Govt. !
I don't believe it was what you suggest... a job creation scheme. There
was a firm requirement (at the time) for something that wouln't get knocked out of the sky before it got anywhere near a target, even though today it looks like it would have just been a cold-war deterrent, but would have had a useful role right up to Desert Storm... maybe even still in service.
There are probably a few good reasons why this aircraft and its story lives on in spirit yet creates such incredible angst...
1) It was used as a pawn to bring together and effectively nationalise competing aircraft makers in the military sector postwar... when those makers did so, they were betrayed at the final cut of the dice, and very badly so... a promise was broken, at national/govt. level
2) A lot of very skilled design engineers, technicians, fitters and craftsmen were made redundant, or threatened it. Bare in mind that not very long before, trying to build thousands of aircraft and engines for WWII, Britain had found itself very short of just those skills, indeed, as I referred to earlier, the Spitfire itself was threatened circa '38/'39 due to the complexity of some of it's structure - the wing for instance, could not just be farmed out to any old sub-contractors and built to exacting standards (which it required). So those skilled craftmen had undergone, in those days, long apprenticeships, in a whole multitude of trades.
3) the aircraft itself never got a fair hearing at the end of it's quite extraordinary initial test-flight programme - and was self-evidently lightyears ahead of its competition, in the same way the Mosquito was in concept and reality, that I like to compare it to.
4) The way BAC were told to destroy all jigs and tools immediately , as well as the design drawings, was just a bridge too and it seemed to so many directly involved that here was the cold face of socialism - bent on destroying a whole industry at one stroke.
To immediately order a competitor that had barely started cutting metal was also hard to swallow - unless they were to be given to the UK gratis in exchange for desisiting in being so ill-mannered as to follow the incredibly succesful export orders of the Canberra with another winner - which they weren't aot to do, building in heavy cancellation penalties which we signed up to no doubt without a galnce at the small print.
It probably would have been better to mothball the whole project, and take a five year moratorium on future requirements while things simmered down
Oh! And never listen to a US salesman... half-truths can be the blackest and most damaging of lies.