Are you guys really serious?
"...one of the UK's most significant military aircraft that helped to keep the peace for 30 years....."
Yeah right. Perhaps for 5 or 10 but not for 30. We used to go and "fight" the thing in the 70's and quite frankly it was a piece of junk. A huge lumbering piece of crap that even at 55,000 ft was a sitting duck. It did look nice though, especially through the gun sight!
That aside, are you really expecting a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs to front up hundreds of thousands of pounds to TRY and keep this thing flying? This isn't the RAF that had an almost unlimited budget to keep these dinasours flying. Even the Lightning was "costing" 1000 man hours on the ground for every 1 ( yes 1 [one]) flying hour when it went out of service. So who do you think is going to fund it? And if it's such a special aeroplane, why has'nt it flown since it went out of service? The answer is that to try and do so is too expensive! Period.
Yes, it looked good at airshows when flown by a competant display pilot. In fact, I'll go as far as to say that it did one of the most impressive displays I've every seen at Waddington in 1976. But is this a good reason to try and persuade people to part with a fortune to have one kept flying by someone who most likely would'nt be able to show it off to it's best effect?
Let the thing die gracefully and remain in people's memories the way they would like to remember it.