UK Constitution: Peter Hitchens - Man who confides in vegetables to be King!

There has been nonsense in the news about the idea of skipping out Prince Charles for younger and less cranky Prince William in terms of the line of succession for the throne - in terms of the constitution this is laughable.

Peter Hitchens, in the Mail on Sunday, is on vintage form rubbishing the idea in his article He may chat to parsnips but Charles MUST be King Here are a few choice excerpts:

“Prince Charles must succeed his mother when that sad moment comes. Opinion polls suggesting that we pass the throne to Prince William over his father’s head are both ­constitutionally stupid and slightly sinister.

We all know that today’s public darling is tomorrow’s burned-out case. The fact that a fickle public, asked a question in an internet survey, prefers the youth of William to the quizzical permanent middle age of Charles tells us nothing of value. William will age as well. If he became King because he was young and good-looking, he could pres­umably be removed the moment he began to get lined and bald. How silly. In an era when our politics is full of callow young men with no real experience of life or the world, Prince Charles is a reassuringly wise figure, whose thoughts on many things are a good deal less weird than the Prime Minister’s hurriedly invented bilge about Big Societies and Gross National Hap­piness. Someone has obviously told Mr Cameron that he needs a philos­ophy to be respectable. So he has got Mr Steve Hilton to levitate for a bit and come up with one. No wonder Charles talks to members of the vegetable kingdom. It must be far more rewarding to chat to the average parsnip than to listen to the careerist PR men, California gurus, retread Marxists, Europhiles and backstairs-crawlers who now infest the upper reaches of the ­British political class.”