Boris Johnson has revealed his weirdly specific new hobby: mastering the form of a cow.
The former UK Prime Minister has told TalkTV, the Rupert Murdoch-backed British television channel, that he spends his days drawing cattle after resigning in scandal last year.
In his first major TV interview since leaving office, Johnson sat down with his friend and colleague Nadine Dorries, the former UK Culture Secretary.
“At the moment I’ve got a project, which is to master the form of the cow,” he told Friday Night with Nadine in an exchange that bordered on bizarre.
Johnson continued: “Cows are actually far more difficult to draw than you think. How many toes on the front does a cow have? It’s two, and they’ve got a little thing on the heel. And what do you call that bit of the cow? I think it’s called the withers. What do you call the back of the knee of the cow? The hock.
“They repay a lot of study. So, I’m filling a book now with cow. Pictures of parts of cows, and a lot of whole cows and my objective is to master the cow. I’m getting there. Next stop the horse after that.”
It’s not the first time Johnson has revealed an unusual hobby. He told TalkRadio in 2019 that he makes model buses. “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,” he said.
TalkTV has dripped out headlines from the interview for days, but the context of the sit-down has also provoked debate. Dorries and Johnson are close allies, provoking questions about whether the interview will be rigorous. Dorries is also the latest sitting UK lawmaker to land her own TV show, prompting media regulator Ofcom to remind broadcasters about their duty to impartiality.
When pressed on the Downing Street partygate scandal, Johnson said people were “out of their mind” to think that he was “knowingly going to parties that were breaking lockdown rules in Number 10, and then knowingly covering up parties that were illicit.”
He added that it was “vanishingly unlikely” that Vladimir Putin will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. “In practical terms, it wouldn’t make that much difference on the battlefield. He will simply forfeit any hope of keeping any opinion on side, anywhere in the world. It would be a disaster for him,” he said.
The post Boris Johnson Says He Spends His Days Drawing Cows After Scandal Forced Him From Office appeared first on Deadline.
