Once again posting with trepidation, as a guest... but -
If we want a new ground attack aircraft, why don't we just bloody well make one, while we've at least the shade of the ability to do it? It strikes me that Typhoon is essentially a British aircraft which could have been done without outside involvement, to the net benefit of the project in terms of reduced wrangling over the specification. Keeping it in house means that it doesn't have make a huge dent in the balance of payments, provides lots of employment, and, what d'you know, other people (well, Saudi) might buy them, to overall positive fiscal effect.
Oh, and don't dither over the spec, keep changing the spec, change the spec when you don't understand what the full consequences will be, or sign up to some ridiculous deal whereby government money covers every possible mistake the manufacturers make. Then you might get something with decent clarity of purpose, in a timely manner, within a respectable distance of the original quote.
And you might actually be able to take some schoolkids to RAF Little Wrinklybum and show them one, and those of them which wish to be engineers on such highly diverting projects would have an ice cube's chance in hell of actually becoming such.
Is there anything wrong with this picture? Serious question.