"Arise, Sir Jim"?

[The Caledonian Mercury today has a feature in which Dave Hewitt suggests six possible candidates for the knighthood going begging now that Fred Goodwin no longer has it.  One suggestion reads as follows:]

Jim Swire already has a title – doctor – but he deserves a bigger one. He is the father of Flora, one of the on-the-plane victims of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing in 1988, and has worked tirelessly – and one fears fruitlessly – to try and establish the truth of what happened in that terrible event.

Lockerbie and everything after is more obscured by governmental deceit and political smokescreening than almost any incident of terrorism – and, whatever one thinks about Dr Swire’s belief that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is not the guilty party, he deserves great credit for remaining the honest and humble man amid a sea of criminal dissembling and murky geopolitics.

Against Dr Swire, in the current political climate, is that he was schooled at Eton – but his having been born in Windsor ought to make the investiture side of things go smoothly, in satnav terms at least. By rights he should get something with the word Nobel written across it – but Goodwin’s knighthood would do pretty well to be going on with. It would, at the very least, restore some credibility to a tarnished award.