TORY leadership hopeful Liz Truss has claimed she was branded “Haggis Basher” by at school after her family moved from Scotland to England.

The bookies’ favourite to become the next Prime Minister, who lived for a time in a well-off part of Paisley, Renfrewshire, said she had a “very Scottish accent” when she moved to Leeds as a child.

Foreign Secretary Truss moved around as a child, living in Scotland and Canada before her family settled in the North of England.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, she said she was made fun of for her accent when she relocated to Yorkshire.

READ MORE: 'No second Scottish independence referendum on my watch', Liz Truss insists

She said: “I once had a very Scottish accent.

“It was a Paisley Glaswegian accent and when I got to Leeds I used to be known as ‘Haggis Basher’. That was my nickname.”

Truss attended Roundhay School, a mixed comprehensive in a leafy and well-to-do suburb of the city.

Her recollections of her childhood have been called into question before – including recently falsely claiming she had grown up in a “red wall” area, despite the constituency covering the area being a Conservative stronghold until 1997.

In the same interview, she claimed she was wound up by “leftie progressive nonsense” from “trendy” teachers.

Truss is tipped to beat former Chancellor Rishi Sunak for the Tory leadership contest, which will see around 180,000 Conservative Party members chose the next Prime Minister.

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Sunak enjoys the backing of more MPs than Truss, who has been accused of being incompetent in her past roles in Government by former top special adviser Dominic Cummings, but the Foreign Secretary is thought to be more popular with the party grassroots.

Truss also said this week she would attempt to stop a second referendum on Scottish independence for her entire term as Prime Minister, if elected.

She told The Telegraph: “The SNP lost the 2014 referendum and Nicola Sturgeon is now leading a campaign of deception to steamroller the UK and break up the Union. But I am completely clear that there will be no second Scottish independence referendum on my watch.

“The Scottish Independence Referendum Bill isn’t legal and will be invalidated if passed by the Scottish Parliament. When Westminster devolved power to Scotland, it did not include the ability to hold valid referenda to break up the Union.

"Any Scotland independence referendum would need to be authorised by the Westminster parliament. If I become prime minister, I would not grant that authority."

Keith Brown, the SNP deputy leader, said her comments showed “how out of touch” the Tory leadership candidate is with “people across Scotland”.