UPDATE: As of Thursday (Oct. 20), Liz Truss announced that she had resigned as prime minister of the U.K. after just 45 days in office, according to The Guardian. She did not outlast the lettuce.
Will U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss last in the position longer than the estimated 10 days it takes for a head or lettuce wearing googly eyes to go bad?
London-based news outlet Daily Star has posed the unlikely question and currently has a live feed of said lettuce, placed next to a photo of Truss, up on its YouTube page.
“Liz Truss's calamitous premiership is odds on with the bookies to fail before the Daily Star’s own wet lettuce turns sour,” said the Daily Star.
Truss has only been in office since early September, when she won an election to be the head of the U.K.’s center-right Conservative Party or Tory Party, one of the two major parties in the country along with the left-leaning Labour Party. Her predecessor as party leader and prime minister, Boris Johnson, announced his resignation in July in the wake of controversies such as the “Partygate” scandal.
Johnson delivered his final speech as prime minister Sept. 6. Shortly after Truss took over, Britain’s longest serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, died at age 96 on Sept. 8. Some people took to social media to poke fun at the timing.
According to YouGov, 21% of people like Truss, 28% dislike her and 27% are neutral. As of last Saturday, “Truss’s personal approval rating of -47 is now the worst ever recorded for a prime minister in an Opinium poll for the Observer,” said The Guardian, which noted that this approval rating was even lower than Johnson’s was during “Partygate” and former Prime Minister Theresa May’s in the weeks before she resigned.
At the same time, the outlet reported that “Labour’s lead of 21 points is now the biggest Opinium has ever recorded,” and that 61% of voters in the U.K. think the country should have a general election this year.
While the U.S. continues to struggle with inflation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, so does the U.K. Disapproval with Truss appears to stem at least in part from her economic policies, which included tax cuts.
“Today, we had the absurd spectacle of a prime minister, barely a month into the job, abandoning the central tax-cutting purpose of her premiership and sacking her closest political ally, who had implemented this vision,” wrote Tom McTague in an article published Friday in the Atlantic. “This all in aid of a vain and surely doomed attempt to cling to power, after the markets concluded that her policies were insane.”
McTague explained that Conservative Party leadership in the U.K. is considering removing Truss and putting in a new prime minister before an election. That could make her the shortest-serving prime minister since George Canning died after serving for 119 days in 1827.
Will Truss’ tenue outlast the head of lettuce? Well, that’s yet to be seen.
As noted above, Truss reportedly resigned Thursday (Oct. 20) after 45 days in office.
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