a number of books, says that Mountbatten went out of his way to convince the Australian Government not to buy the TSR-2
That's true. He did. But his efforts were ignored by Australia and the UK (in fact our Defence Minister eventually asked him to keep his mouth shut). Point is, Mountbatten's poison actually had no influence on Australia, it's just that countless authors have (wrongly) claimed that it did.
You seem to be suggesting that my comments are merely opinion, whilst comments made in other books and magazines are fact. That obviously doesn't make any sense at all. As I've explained, almost everything that has been written about TSR2 for fifty years has simply been handed-down from the Hastings book. You have to bear in mind that authors of aviation books and magazine articles (and particularly web-based media) often rely on material that has been previously published. TSR2 is a worst-case scenario because very little was actually written about the aircraft (mostly in the Hastings book) and the same key points have therefore been re-used endlessly for decades.
It is only when you stop to take a completely fresh look, without assuming that anything that has been said previously is necessarily true, that you find a different story. If you look at the key points and then try to establish some factual basis to support them, you find nothing, and actually find evidence to reveal something very different. Okay, you can accuse me of expressing opinion in the case of BAC breaking-up jigs, but as I've said, Healey and Jenkins specifically state that they gave no such order, so that isn't opinion. Therefore (unless you imagine they are telling lies, and why should they?) the decision to scrap everything must have been taken by BAC and of course it would have been absurd if they hadn't chosen to scrap everything. Surely you don't imagine that the jigs and hardware from every cancelled project is saved, just in case it's needed again? So what I said isn't opinion as such, it's an assumption based on facts, and common sense.
Conversely, the assertion that the Government issued some bizarre order to destroy everything is patently incorrect. As I've said, Healey and Jenkins were the two ministers responsible, and neither of them made any such order. Likewise, they state quite clearly that they did
not order the destruction of the aircraft and that they actually offered them to BAC. So that isn't opinion, it's
fact.
I think the problem is that you're assuming that everything you've read before is somehow true, just because you've read it time and time again. That's a dangerous assumption no matter what the subject. Just because something is repeated for decades doesn't mean it was ever true. Ultimately, the previously-published material on the subject was very much "opinion" (like you accuse mine of being) but much more so, as there is clear evidence to destroy all of the myths that have been peddled for so long.
I accept that it can be a bit of a culture shock to hear that almost everything you'd read and learned about TSR2 was wrong, but sometimes that's what happens. I was just as surprised as anyone else when I bothered to look into the subject, instead of simply repeating the stuff that has been churned-out many times before.
Basically, the TSR2 story has been flawed for fifty years because of the inability of aviation writers to actually research their subject, and because far too many people have wanted to believe the story because it was vaguely exciting, and conjured-up an interesting tale of political dark deeds and wicked socialist exploits. The truth is that the story was rather more prosaic, but of course that's not quite so much fun to read and re-tell!
