I haven’t looked at the wiki page so apologise if I am repeating things you have already seen, very brief summarisation of the book I quoted above,
AFVG and F-111 were supposed to take over the role left vacant after the TSR2 cancellation. The TSR2 was going to cost 270 million in launching costs and 3.4 million per aircraft based on 100 aircraft, 50 F-111’s was going to cost 125 million (had escalated to 425 million at time of cancellation), UK share of AFVG launching costs was 150 million and each AFVG would cost 1.7 million.
A Memorandum of Understanding on the AFVG and ECAT was announced on the 17 May 1965.
The French manufacturers lead by Dassault wanted to go their own way instead of sticking to the AFVG concept and secretly started work on the mirage F1 and 3G. The French told Healey on 29 June 1967 that they were withdrawing from the project.
Reading between the lines I assume that the only reason the ECAT survived is because it was being run by Breguet and not Dassault, later when Dassault took over Breguet they did everything possible to harpoon Jaguar sales in favour of their own products.
Paul
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