Why UK Prime Minister Liz Truss is in a race with lettuce

Liz Truss is fighting to stay in office but a British tabloid has pitted the 37-day-old Prime Minister against a lettuce to see whether it would decay first or she would lose her job.

The Daily Star newspaper has set up a livestream of an unrefrigerated head of iceberg lettuce next to a photograph of the struggling Truss. The organisation tweeted, as of this moment, eight hours ago, “Day one: Which wet lettuce will last longer?”

They event went so far as to provide the lettuce with some personality by attaching a pair of googly eyes to it, to really bring home the bit. You can watch the Daily Star’s livestream below. 

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The newspaper’s stunt comes behind the tail of another piece of journalism regarding the UK’s Prime Minister. Earlier this week, the Economist magazine published a column titled “The Iceberg Lady”, with them describing the Conservative leader as having the “shelf-life of a lettuce”.

The magazine’s title itself is a play on Truss’s political role model, the Iron Lady of the 1980s, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. 

Truss ran for the Conservative Party leadership on a platform that promised tax cuts and deregulation in an attempt to jumpstart the heart of a stagnant economy. 

However, shortly after being made the PM, Truss announced an economic plan that shattered investor confidence, leading to a drastic slide in the value of the pound. The Bank of England had to step in to save pension funds, even as mortgage and borrowing rates went up. 

Since then however, Truss has fired her finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng, replaced him with a former foreign and health secretary, Jeremy Hunt and promised to change aspects of the proposed tax cuts.

But she has to find the funds somewhere, which is proving difficult to do, considering her party has already spent the last few years slowly but surely cutting funding to public services.