In 1962 Britain and France signed a treaty to design, build and test a supersonic airliner together. In October 1964 Harold Wilson’s Labour government took office, set a review of the project in hand, and decided to withdraw.
Wilson sent his aviation minister, Roy Jenkins, to Paris with the news. According to a historian writing on the UK government’s history blog, the French response was to withdraw all diplomatic communication with London.
On January 20, 1965, Jenkins answered a question in the House of Commons. “We had, and we still retain, some doubts about the financial and economic aspects of the project,” he said. But the Prime Minister had told the French Prime Minister “that we stand by the treaty obligations into which the last Government decided to enter.” The review was over. Britain was going ahead.
Under questioning, Jenkins said the project would cost “at least £140 million of British taxpayers’ money,” and that the government was “determined not to spend the money and then not catch the market.”
The doubts stayed. In March 1969, a month before Concorde’s first British test flight, the attorney general advised that walking away alone carried a “fifty-fifty chance” of “unacceptable costs”, because France could sue for breach of the treaty. Tony Benn, the minister of technology, reminded the cabinet that 16,000 workers were building Concorde, 8,000 of them in Bristol. The cabinet put off any decision to withdraw and planned to slow research and development funding instead.
Concorde flew. It never sold to any airline other than British Airways and Air France. Commercial flights began in 1976, three years behind schedule, at a cost the government historian puts at over £1.3 billion, against an original estimate of £70 million. Benn, who stayed a champion of the plane, joked in his diary about the “e” at the end of its name: he could have added “e” for extravagance and “e” for escalation.
The same year passenger flights began, the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins and T. R. Carlisle published a short paper in Nature about a fallacy in how biologists reasoned about parental investment. By 1980 Dawkins was calling it the Concorde fallacy: “investing further in a project simply because one has invested in it heavily in the past, rather than because of potential future return on investment.”
The government’s own papers tell a messier story than the nickname. The reasons ministers wrote down in 1969 pointed forward: a lawsuit they might lose, 16,000 jobs. Whether those were the whole story, the papers cannot say.
Today retired Concordes stand in museums at Bristol, Manchester and Weybridge. Couples have married inside them.