George Canning

Until Liz Truss, George Canning was the shortest-serving prime minister. He needn't be forgotten by pub quizzers, general knowledge collectors and ...

Extend the reference to the trained-bands of organised labour and the parallels become even more striking. His speeches to corporations became as important as any that he delivered in the house. It was not enough, however, to convince his enemies of his loyalty and until his death the charge of deviousness was at the root of many of their criticisms. Both groups knew that early in life, and apparently for the sake of a seat in Parliament, Canning had deserted the Whig connection in which he had been brought up, and with it the friends who had helped him in his youth; both groups also knew that Canning's mother was a professional actress. His marriage, to a girl in whom devotion and good sense were almost miraculously allied to a considerable fortune, eventually enabled him to buy his own way into parliamentary seats, if he wished, but not until the death of Pitt was he entirely free from obligations which influenced his political behaviour. Their loyalty to their leader — for that was the position which Canning swiftly and effortlessly came to occupy amongst them — was matched only by his loyalty to Pitt. For Canning rose through a system which it was impossible to reconcile with the ideas of the reformers, without possessing any of the hereditary interests which the anti-reformers sought to defend. On issues concerning freedom of individual conscience, that is, he was liberal, and this almost induced the Whigs to believe that he was one of them. From the start he was opposed to discrimination against Roman Catholics, to the slave trade and to despotism. Two factors should recommend her book to a wider public: the ease and clarity of her style, which makes it an exceptional pleasure to read, and Canning's peculiar position as the first British Prime Minister to have been a career politician in the modern sense. Part of the reason is to be found in a certain ambivalence in the man himself. Something similar occurs with his oratory: this made an enormous impression on all his contemporaries, and after the death of Pitt he was widely regarded as the most brilliant speaker in the house, yet a picture of him as a man of passionate convictions would be misleading.