I couldn't connect at around 6 or 7 am, GMT, so i went and played GT Sport, tried again at around 9 am and everything in Elite was fine and working again...
At the time that Elite wasn't connecting, i checked could i connect to the PS store and sinc my trophies (which you generally can't when PSN is down or spotty) and they were working fine, though i did notice a small red X next to my PSN profile on the top menu, which isn't normally displayed, which disappeared as soon as i opened up GT Sport...
While i didn't try Elite again for as said, about two hours when it indeed worked, i wonder if the simple process of connecting to GT Sport which got rid of the strange red X, would have let me straight back into Elite, had i not gotten comfortable in my cars...
IF anyone still hasn't gotten back into Elite but hasn't tried connecting to any other PSN games also, their networking protocols MIGHT fix whatever's stopping Elite connecting, assuming it's an Elite or Frontier specific networking glitch - it can't hurt to try anyway :_ .