UK PM frontrunner Johnson explains his favourite pastime - making buses

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Boris Johnson said on Tuesday his passion is to make buses out of old wooden crates, explaining how he paints passengers "enjoying themselves" on their environmentally friendly transport.

In an interview with talkRADIO, the frontrunner to replace Prime Minister Theresa May, was asked what he does for pleasure.

Stuttering, the former Mayor of London initially struggled to describe his favourite pastime, first explaining that he liked to make models of buses and then contradicting himself to say that was not exactly what he meant.

"I don't mean models of buses. What I make is, I get old ... wooden crates right, and then I paint them and, suppose it's a box that has been used to contain two wine bottles and it will have a dividing thing, I turn it into a bus," he said.

"I paint the passengers enjoying themselves on the wonderful bus, low-carbon of the kind that we brought to the streets of London, reducing CO2, reducing nitrous oxide, reducing pollution."

Johnson has history with buses. In the run-up to Britain's 2016 EU membership referendum, he travelled around on a campaign coach emblazoned with the eye-catching but now widely contested claim that the UK sends 350 million pounds a week to the EU.

Elswhere in the radio interview, Johnson, 55, went on to say he greatly admired Greek statesman Pericles, who, he said, coined the phrase that "politics is about the many, not the few", a similar slogan to that used by Britain's main opposition Labour Party.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Piper; Editing by Stephen Addison)