LONDON: A British newspaper on Friday pitted Liz Truss in a race against a lettuce, asking readers if they thought the under-fire prime minister would lose her job before the vegetable decayed.
The tabloid Daily Star set up a live feed of an unrefrigerated iceberg next to a photo of Truss.
"Which wet lettuce will last longer?," it asked in a Twitter post showing the feed that had garnered over 50,000 likes in its first five hours online.
The stunt echoed a comment at the other end of Britain's journalistic spectrum. In a column published this week titled "The Iceberg Lady", the Economist magazine described Truss as having "the shelf-life of a lettuce".
Truss's political role model, 1980s prime minister Margaret Thatcher, was widely known as the Iron Lady.
Truss on Friday fired her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, after just 38 days in office.
The duo have been under mounting pressure to reverse a disastrously received economic package that forced the Bank of England to intervene in the bond market and prompted Conservative Party colleagues to openly discuss whether they should be replaced.
Asked whether she should resign at a Downing Street press conference, Truss said: "I'm absolutely determined to see through what I have promised, to deliver a higher growth, more prosperous United Kingdom, to see us through the storm we face.
"We've already delivered the energy price guarantee making sure people aren't facing huge bills this winter.
"But it was right in the face of the issues that we had that I acted decisively to ensure that we have economic stability, because that is vitally important to people and businesses right across our country."
Liz Truss needs to hang on as prime minister until the start of next year to avoid her premiership becoming the shortest in British history.
The person who currently holds the title is the Tory statesman George Canning, who spent 118 full days as prime minister in 1827 before dying in office from ill health.
Truss would overtake this number of days on January 3, 2023.
There have been several prime ministers who for various reasons failed to last a year in the job.
They include two Conservative PMs in the past 100 years: Andrew Bonar Law, who clocked up 211 days from 1922 to 1923 before resigning due to poor health, and Alec Douglas-Home, who managed 364 days in1963-64 until losing a general election.
During the 18th and early 19th century it was not unusual for prime ministers to serve for only one or two years, or to do the job for a short spell on several separate occasions.
Once Liz Truss has passed the 118-day mark set by George Canning, other predecessors she can aim to overtake include the 4th Duke of Devonshire, who was PM for 225 days in 1756-57, and the 2nd Earl of Shelburne, who managed 265 days in 1782-83.
Meanwhile, Kwasi Kwarteng has narrowly avoided being the shortest serving chancellor of the exchequer in modern history.
Kwarteng clocked up 38 full days in the role before being sacked by Liz Truss - eight more than Conservative Iain Macleod, who died in office after just 30 days in 1970.
Embattled Truss on Friday announced another drastic U-turn to her tax-slashing mini-budget last month which has prompted market turmoil, vowing to raise corporation tax after all. Hours after sacking her finance minister, and stating the "need to act now to reassure the markets", Truss said: "I have therefore decided to keep the increase in corporation tax that was planned by the previous government". -- Reuters/dpa
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