Is it just me...
If you were making two big ships and already had contracts in place, and were asked to make modifications to one of them that no-one on your team could really be called qualified for - could you really be bothered? I think it quite convenient that ACA pushed the government beyond their price limit.
When are we re-opening the 'road to VSTOL carrier and jets not including VSTOL carrier and jets' logic?
I am sure it would only take a few FOI questions to uncover how much we saved by binning Harrier and CVS. How much we spent on changing QECV to CV and back again. How much we paid RN stovies and maintainers of both cloths to leave. How many slots we now require from USMC and how much we'll pay. I wonder how much we'll actually end up saving and how the 'one type has to go' line may not have been the whole truth.
I feel incredibly sorry for all the guys who've actually put thousands of man hours into this debate, all to be exactly where we were in October 2010...other than then we had a carrier and a VSTOL aeroplane.