Oh, this worship of showing-off. Let’s hear it for the shy | Catherine Bennett

Discretion and reserve were once admired. Now the extroverts are exalted and the quiet seen to be flawed

Thanks to a Freedom of Information request, following a trip to Iraq, newly revealed Foreign Office emails have indicated the lengths to which the mayor of London - also, allegedly, the MP for somewhere or other - will go to get himself noticed.

Since no mayoral word has emerged, to advise why Johnson needed to sprawl on a mountainside with a Kalashnikov, it looks as if this level of visible farce has simply become essential to his role as the country's premier show-off. Albeit he is now competing principally against himself. Photographs of Johnson belly down in the dirt, purporting to "strengthen economic ties between London and Kurdistan", had to outshine all his earlier public performances: knocking over a 10-year-old Japanese boy, giving his wife a lift on his bicycle, mussing his hair on Have I Got News for You, dancing like a loon at the Olympics.

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