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A thousand-year-old piece of embroidery, a hundred-page resignation letter and a man dressed as a bin have almost nothing in common, except that all three explain, better than any textbook, how power actually works.
At quarter past three one morning last week, a lorry reversed into the forecourt of the British Museum. Police cars, sirens, a small crowd of reporters who had stayed up all night for the privilege. Inside was the Bayeux Tapestry, on loan from France for the first time in nearly a thousand years. It looked, and was reported, like a triumph. What most people watching did not realize is that they were seeing the same trick performed twice. Once in the eleventh century, and once again that night.
The original spin job
The facts of 1066 are not in dispute. William, Duke of Normandy, invaded England, killed its king and took the throne by force. The problem for William was not winning the battle. It was what came after. The English public admired his military skill but still regarded him as a foreign occupier, and an occupier with a great deal of local blood on his hands.
So somebody, whether William himself or the clever advisers around him, commissioned 220 feet of linen and wool to solve a communications problem. The tapestry does not simply record events. It reframes them. In the tapestry’s version, Harold did not lose his throne to an invader; he broke a sacred oath and forfeited it to its rightful heir. William is shown backed by the will of heaven and the appearance of Halley’s Comet, just in case anyone needed reminding whose side God was on. It is, scene by scene, one of the most effective pieces of reputation management ever produced, and it has outlasted every press release written since.
I have sat in boardrooms where a version of William’s problem plays out constantly. Whenever one company from one culture takes over another, the deal itself is usually the straightforward part. What takes months of careful work is managing the sense among the people left behind that outsiders have simply arrived and taken charge. William had that exact challenge nearly a thousand years ago, and he solved it with embroidery rather than an internal memo.
The British Museum, coincidentally, had its own version of this problem to solve this month. It has spent recent years fighting one crisis after another: thousands of objects stolen from its own storerooms, a director forced to resign, protests over its sponsors, arguments over whether some of its most famous exhibits belong there at all. Its chairman, George Osborne, understood something that many institutions in trouble forget. You rarely win back trust by rebutting a bad story. You win it back by giving people a better one to tell instead. Hence the police escort, the projection of the tapestry onto the White Cliffs of Dover thanking France, the newspaper feature marveling at the design of the display case built to house it. None of this happened by accident. All of it was built to let the public feel something other than suspicion created by recent events.
The hundred-page goodbye
A project manager at a major Chinese technology firm recently announced her resignation in a document running to roughly 75,000 words, detailing what she described as a punishing and toxic culture inside the company. It leaked internally, spread fast, and within days her former boss had resigned as well.
Almost nobody will read the whole thing. That is rather the point. The length itself became the story, a signal of seriousness that a polite two-paragraph resignation letter could never send. Compare that with a tradition closer to home: the terse, pointed ministerial resignation letter, designed to be read in full by every political journalist within the hour precisely because it is short enough to fit on one page and sharp enough to dominate the next day’s headlines.
Working with departing executives over the years, I have learned that a resignation is never purely an HR matter. It is a reputational negotiation for both sides, usually conducted behind the scenes long before any public announcement, with lawyers’ wordsmithing statements that satisfy confidentiality clauses while still allowing someone to feel they have set the record straight. Not everyone has the leverage, or the courage, to let a document speak for them the way this one did. But when someone does, and it lands, it demonstrates something companies would rather forget: control of the internal narrative is never guaranteed simply because you sign the paycheques.
The bin who broke the internet
Count Binface, a satirical candidate who dresses as a sentient bin, generated more attention in the run up to a parliamentary by-election than most professional campaigns manage, even with budgets and strategists behind them. No advertising spend could have bought that reach.
There is a reason for this that goes beyond novelty. The powerful can absorb criticism, deflect statistics, and outlast most conventional attacks. What they struggle with is being laughed at, because there is no dignified way to respond to a joke without looking either humorless or frightened. Britain has a long tradition of using comedy against entrenched power, from the Fool in King Lear through decades of election stunts, and it works precisely because it cannot be countered with the usual tools of spin.
I often think of a story from years ago involving a private equity figure confronted outside his church by protesters and a camel, making a biblical point about wealth.
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
— Matthew 19:24, King James Version
It could have defined him. It did not. He went on to chair a major national institution. Humor and stunts land hardest on those who take themselves too seriously in response. Handled with a touch of self-awareness rather than outrage, they tend to pass.
A medieval artefact, a resignation letter and a man in a bin costume have nothing obvious in common, but each one shows the same underlying truth about influence. Facts rarely move the needle. Stories do, and the people who grasp this, who tell the better story with the better timing, tend to be the ones still standing afterwards. The tools change from one century to the next. Embroidery becomes a well-timed leak, a comet becomes a social media clip, a fool’s cap becomes a bin costume. The tools may change, but the fascinating world of the pursuit of power remains.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed in this article/column are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of South Asian Herald.
