JW,
I waive all copyright on said phrase.
Before I rewrote my post I called Pongo and his mate "the coalition of the unwitting", which was a bit more witty, but was also a bit kind. You need to describe a worse degree of brainlessness when slagging off those who accept Page's lunatic ramblings uncritically.
The figure of £42.4 m per Tranche 2 jet was originally produced by the NAO, when the guidelines of what to include gave what was, as near as damn it, a unit flyaway cost (though in uK terms, this still includes elements that would be kept out of a US unit flyaway figure). This figure of £42 m (£45 m for Tranche 1) tallies with the equivalent official German, Italian and Spanish unit flyaway costs, and is, as you'd expect, slightly lower than the leaked original price for Austria. I have had that price confirmed in writing by the Typhoon IPT, and I have confirmation, in writing, from the IPT (in response to an FOI request) that the current NAO figure does include elements that mean that it is NOT anything like what we'd expect in a unit flyaway or unit production cost.