In one of the stranger revelations of the Conservative leadership campaign, Boris Johnson has said 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 a baffled-sounding interviewer, 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 C0 2 , reducing nitrous oxide, reducing pollution.”

It has been previously reported that Johnson enjoyed painting with his partner, Carrie Symonds. Johnson has written a biography of Winston Churchill, another politician who liked to paint.

During the interview, Johnson 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.

He was somewhat more woolly when asked about the last sports match he attended, which he could not remember, but he said he enjoyed playing tennis.

The answer later came to him: “I watched a cricket match. I went to watch England against someone or other. Unfortunately I fell asleep, anyway, that went badly.”