"Also heard that the KC-45 competition was "completely irrelevant" to the UK, and that we'd be stuck with our plainest of plain vanilla A330 tankers."
your almost certainly right, though i would have thought that the ability to carry cargo on the main deck might be attractive to the bidding consortium, even if the boom wasn't
wishfull thinking on my part i know
the other advantage to that being buy a couple of paletized Exec suites and you can utilise any of the fleet in the "Blair force one" role