Boris Johnson thanks President Macron for loaning the Bayeux Tapestry to the British Museum but reframes the 230-foot medieval textile as French political propaganda. The work's illustrations and Latin captions—reading 'Here the French are fighting' and 'And the English turned tail and fled'—commemorate Norman victory whilst depicting English humiliation, Johnson argues, making the loan a pointed reminder of 1066 rather than a gesture of goodwill.

Johnson catalogues the conquest's destructive aftermath for England, citing historian John Gillingham's view that the Norman takeover constituted a catastrophe that eliminated the entire Anglo-Saxon aristocratic class through murder or dispossession. He details how the conquered English population was systematically subordinated under Norman rule, including through the law of 'Englishry', which forced English peasants to prove a corpse's English identity or face collective brutal punishment—a legal framework that institutionalised Norman supremacy over native inhabitants.