The Treaty

You can get The Gist on this story here

In a hangar in Somerset, children are brought to see an aeroplane, the way they are brought to see dinosaurs. I was one of those children. I stood under it at the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Yeovilton. It is weird. Each plane symbolises a step forward. A stage on the way to something better: the steam engine gave way to diesel, the biplane to the jet, the jet to the bigger jet. This one sits as a monument, and everything newer is somehow less good, less impressive, and entirely forgettable. 

In February 1996, it crossed the Atlantic in 2 hours and 53 minutes. 30 years on, nothing can. Besides emails and memes you send your American friends to wake up to. It is the only machine in our lifetime whose story runs backwards. Britain built it, perfected it, then unbuilt it, and the reason for its existence? Because we simply couldn’t not do it. 

On 29 November 1962, in London, Britain and France signed a treaty to build a supersonic airliner together: 7 articles, costs split equally, work split equally, proceeds split equally. Britain was empireless and, short of starting a new one, thought it best to remain part of one when applying to the Common Market; France was the gatekeeper to that particular club (historically, very familiar for us) and building the fastest aeroplane together felt like the right way to crack that particular nut.  Those 7 articles never mentioned how either country could get out. Conveniently. 6 weeks later, on 14 January 1963, Charles de Gaulle (noted purveyor of embroidered hats) stood up at a press conference and vetoed Britain's membership anyway.

This, coming from the man who said, “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” was rich. 

Naturally, Britain tried to get out almost immediately. A new government arrived in October 1964, found the cost had already doubled (I think I’ve seen this sketch before) and announced an urgent review of the project on 26 October, 10 days into the job. On 28 October, the new Aviation Minister, Roy Jenkins, flew to Paris carrying the cabinet's instructions to get out of Concorde. His French counterpart, M. Jacquet, listened and pointed to the treaty: it had no escape clause, and the agreement allowed no revision. Imagine flying to another country to resign from something, only to be told no. Many single people know this feeling well.

Back home, the Attorney General, Sir Elwyn Jones, advised that France could sue Britain for "not far short of £100 million," most of the money cancellation was meant to save, and the British Aircraft Corporation added that pulling out would close Filton airfield. Poor bugger didn’t survive anyway. The cabinet chewed on all of it for 2 months and folded on 18 January 1965 (definitely seen this sketch before). The public version, 2 days later: "we stand by the treaty obligations." That is the diplomatic way of saying, “through gritted teeth.”

The Commons Estimates Committee, picking through the wreckage of the failed cancellation, observed that a break clause "would have been an entirely natural and proper section" of a treaty committing Parliament to so heavy a burden. That is the diplomatic way of saying, “YOU IDIOTS!”

The official record gives up the real story. 

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The clause was never forgotten. The French Ministry of Finance wanted it. The British Treasury wanted it. Julian Amery, the Aviation Minister who signed the treaty, insisted it was left out and registered the document at the United Nations for good measure. Both finance ministries asked for a way out, and the man holding the pen deliberately locked every door, against his own side, against every future chancellor, against the next 14 years of spending reviews. Each review went looking for the exit, and each found Amery had been there first. He is the reason the plane exists.

Everyone has been there. You finished the degree because, 2 years in, quitting cost the same as carrying on. The renovation that passed the point where selling up meant losing more than finishing. All adult advice runs the other way: know your sunk costs, walk away clean, and it’s usually right. The whole uncomfortable joke of Concorde is what happens when it's wrong: everything the walking-away rule is designed to prevent, poured into the sky at Mach 2.

So Britain built it, because stopping cost as much as finishing, through the worst decade its postwar economy has had. £70m in 1962 became £1.5bn to £2.1bn by 1976. The work carried on through the three-day week at the start of 1974, when the country could not keep its own lights on, and past 15 December 1976, when Britain signed the letter asking the IMF for $3.9bn. The customers faced no treaty: 16 airlines had taken out 74 options, and when the oil crisis hit, Pan Am and TWA cancelled on the same day, 31 January 1973, and the rest followed. 20 aircraft were built. 14 ever carried a paying passenger: 7 for British Airways and 7 for Air France. A plane conceived for the world's fleets ended up flying for exactly the 2 governments that couldn't stop themselves from making it, nations whose proudest shared tradition was giving each other a good hammering. A proud tradition, alive and well in Concorde. 

The papers called it a scandal for the whole 14 years, which, if you read the last two paragraphs closely, butters a lot of parsnips. But there was no real roadmap for the thing that was conceived. The Droop noses, carbon brakes, fly-by-wire before anyone had a name for it, a machine that cruised at twice the speed of sound for 27 years without a rival ever taking off. The scandal and the achievement were the same line item, and we still can't decide which column to file it in.

In February 1979 the Treasury closed the book. It wrote off £160m and handed the entire fleet to British Airways, on the condition that the government kept 80% of any future profits. Evidently, because it valued its chances of success in the market the same way we would assess a vegan’s chances of becoming a butcher.

Why tell this sordid origin story? Well, it taught me something about how nations, and thus people, work. A country can only finish what it cannot cancel. The cathedrals went up over so many generations that the masons who cut the foundations knew they would never see a roof; the railway network was laid in a mania that ruined investors by the thousand; nobody who could see the thing in its totality, from the end, would have ended up committing. It is the ultimate repudiation of the sunk cost fallacy. Concorde is probably the thing we are most proud of. Permanence has never once been a sound investment. It is simply the only thing that produces the things we end up keeping.

On 26 November 2003 the last Concorde ever built flew home to Filton to be switched off, and it came in over the Clifton Suspension Bridge. I was living in Bristol then, and I was there, one face in a city that had come outdoors on a Wednesday. The photograph from that day, the white delta crossing Brunel's bridge, one engineering century saluting another, has been called the greatest aviation photograph ever taken. Beyond the plane, it records the crowd: every rooftop, every verge, an entire city standing still to watch a government overspend come home. Nobody has ever stood on a bridge to watch a cancelled project land.

Next week: the plane nobody could cancel meets the only question that ever made it pay.

See you on the next one.