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' political role model, 1980s prime minister Margaret Thatcher, was widely known as the Iron Lady.

Truss yesterday 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.

- Reuters