A SPITTING Image puppet of Sir Winston Churchill is set to fetch at least £700 at auction – 141 years after the wartime leader was born at Blenheim Palace.

The 12-inch high foam rubber effigy from the satirical TV show, which ran on ITV between 1984 and 1996, will be sold at Bonhams in Knightsbridge, London, on December 10. 

According to auctioneers, the puppet’s eyes have an "inoperative side-to-side mechanism and an air-operated eyelid movement".

Churchill's puppet was previously sold 15 years ago at a Sotheby's auction by one of the show's creators, Roger Law. It was in the same lot as an Adolf Hitler puppet and the pair sold for £1,905.

Some 200 Spitting Image puppets sold for a total of £370,105. 

Among them was that of disgraced publishing and media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who lived in Oxford's Headington Hill Hall and was once the chairman of Oxford United. His puppet fetched £1,288.

Mr Law said at the time: "When we first planned the sale, we thought it might make around £100,000 and I hoped to make enough to put down a deposit on a house in Australia and buy a new surfboard. Now I could buy the entire beach."

Blenheim Palace has celebrated Sir Churchill's life over the course of 2015, as the year marked the 50th anniversary of his death in January 1965. 

A Churchill-themed visitor day is being held tomorrow to celebrate his birthday on November 30, 1874.