Each country the car is sold in gets to pick their own specification, so the RoI folks chose to add a heatpump to the top model, they may have left out something else, or just adjusted the price to suit.
For some reason, UK manufacturers staff who set the specification often leave out the heatpump saying we don’t need it. Personally I think it’s because their offices are in the South East, so they rarely experience any time at low temps, as opposed to Northern England /Scotland which often has temps in single digits at virtually any time of the year (today was 7 deg during my commute for example).
In life, it's not who you know that's important, it's how your wife found out.