There are so many ironies in the TSR2 saga. The Admiralty was undoubtedly dead-set against the TSR2 for obvious reasons, and historians have painted Mountbatten as the “bad guy” who did a great deal to kill-off the project. Maybe he did (although documentation shows that it was the US’s better offer which ultimately swayed the Australians, not Mountbatten) but in fairness it was the manufacturers who effectively destroyed the aircraft for themselves. Okay, they did this because of the way in which the Government bullied them into merging, but if all parties had taken a more realistic view and not treated TSR2 as a “super plane” which would be funded with a bottomless bucket of money, the whole saga would have ended very differently. The real irony is that despite their political motives, the Admiralty were right, and the RAF should have simply opted for the Buccaneer in the first place… which they did eventually of course even if by force rather than choice… and then reluctantly admitted that it was a brilliant aircraft!