A BIZARRE video has emerged where Boris Johnson says he relaxes by making models of buses and painting happy passengers onboard.
Speaking on Talk Radio as part of a series of media appearances on Tuesday, Johnson, the frontrunner to replace Theresa May, explained his hobby to baffled politics editor, Ross Kempsell.
Asked what he did to relax, Johnson said: “I like to paint. Or I make things. I have a thing where I make models of buses. What I make is, I get old, I don’t know, wooden crates, and I paint them. It’s a box that’s been used to contain two wine bottles, right, and it will have a dividing thing. And I turn it into a bus.
“So I put passengers – I paint the passengers enjoying themselves on a wonderful bus – low carbon, of the kind that we brought to the streets of London, reducing C02, reducing nitrous oxide, reducing pollution.”
It is unclear whether the statement is true but it has previously been reported that Johnson enjoys painting with his partner, Carrie Symonds and he has written a biography of Winston Churchill, another politician who painted as a hobby. Some of their paintings hang on the walls of Symonds's flat in South London.
Given Johnson’s track record with buses, you think he might want to avoid the subject. He was faced with a court case earlier this year over the claim – which was printed on the side of the Vote Leave bus during the EU referendum campaign – that £350 million a week would be pumped into the NHS rather than the EU if the UK voted to leave.
However, the case – which accused Johnson of misleading the public – was thrown out.
Then there were the Routemaster buses he vowed to re-introduced to London as part of his campaign to become London mayor. They were pretty expensive – around £355,000 each.
Dubbed the “most expensive buses in the world” by Sadiq Khan, the next mayor of London announced in 2017 that Transport for London would not be purchasing any more Routemasters.
In the Talk Radio interview, Johnson also said if he could be any historical figure, it would be Pericles of Athens. “He was the guy who said that politics was about the many, not the few – he was the first to use exactly that phrase,” he said.
When asked if he gets angry easily Johnson said: "I'm a pretty even tempered kind of guy."
His reponse to when he feels happiest was: "Like all human beings I probably feel happiest when I accomplish something that I've worked very hard to do ... the sense of completing a great task and that is what we must do. I will not rest until we leave the EU."
I watched this open mouthed the entire way through pic.twitter.com/TNiq8EqWz3
— Hannah Jane Parkinson (@ladyhaja) 25 June 2019
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