Before Liz Truss, this British Prime Minister held the record for shortest tenure

The PM who previously was the shortest-serving British leader was shot and wounded in a duel, succeeded in outmaneuvering Napoleon and died in office.

George Canning, who was the shortest serving British PM – until Liz Truss broke his record.

UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s announcement Thursday that she would resign makes her the shortest-serving British leader in history.

The prime minister who previously held that title was shot and wounded in a duel, succeeded in outmaneuvering Napoleon and died in office.

George Canning was prime minister for just shy of four months in the summer of 1827. For almost two centuries the defining feature of his tenure was its record-breaking brevity.

But on Thursday, Ms Truss eclipsed him by some way, resigning after 45 days in which her approval ratings sank and Britain’s financial markets went into a tailspin.

Like her, Canning went to the University of Oxford and served as foreign secretary.

A member of the Tory Party, his greatest success is deemed to have been during the Napoleonic Wars in 1807, when he outmaneuvered Napoleon, enabling the British to seize the Danish navy.

But he blamed the war minister, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, for setbacks in Spain and in the Netherlands, calling for his resignation and accepting his challenge to a duel in 1809. Canning missed his opponent and was shot in the leg.

For years, Canning came close to, and missed out on, the top job. He was finally appointed prime minister on April 10, 1827, but not without opposition from lawmakers, including the Duke of Wellington, who resigned in protest from cabinet and as head of the army.

Canning was popular with the British middle class and was a champion of Catholic emancipation, under which restrictions on Catholics in Britain, imposed after the Reformation, were repealed. His views provoked the resignations of dozens of ministers who were opposed to such freedoms.

The opposition Whig Party came to Canning’s aid and supported him in parliamentary votes. But the pressure got to him, historians record, and his health deteriorated. He died on August 8, 1827. He was succeeded by Frederick John Robinson, Viscount Goderich, who had served as Canning’s war minister. He left office the following year after being dismissed.

The Wall Street Journal