What should we make of Emmanuel Macron's Bayeux Tapestry offer?

As a nation we have long had a peculiar weakness for revelling in other countries getting the better of us.

The "we’re so crap" school of foreign policy is part of a healthy cynicism about our ruling classes you might say, but it seems to be getting worse since Brexit.

Naturally, those who think leaving the EU is a bad idea have a vested interest in peddling the notion that we are exiting just as those clever continentals are getting their act together and we are falling apart.

The coverage of Emmanuel Macron and his offer of the Bayeux Tapestry is a good case in point.

:: Macron and May to forge future Anglo-French relations

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To some it is what it seems, a French President making a gesture to smooth over potentially tricky tensions after Brexit.

However, others are reading an awful lot more into it, revealing more perhaps about them than the French leader.

For them it is a thinly veiled jab at the Brits, a reminder of a French military triumph over us and of the first time Britain was joined politically with the continent.

If that really was President Macron’s thinking, he might have spent more time studying history at school than chasing his literature teacher.

:: France's Bayeux Tapestry loan: Entente cordiale or poke in the eye?

Excuse the history lesson, but the Battle of Hastings was not a French victory since the Normans were not French.

They were - as their names suggests - Norsemen who had conquered and settled in Normandy, where they made life a merry hell for their French neighbours.

Only 12 years before the Battle of Hastings for instance, William of Normandy had given the French king and his army a thorough thrashing at the Battle of Mortemer, from which the French never really recovered.

In fact the Bayeux Tapestry commemorates the defeat of the French, not the English, or the start of it at least. Four centuries of on and off bloody, military humiliation.

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That is because it marks the moment Norman military technology merged with the wealth and manpower of Anglo-Saxon England. Throw in some Welsh longbowmen and you end up with the crushing French defeats at Agincourt, Crecy and Poitiers.

President Macron probably just meant well when he said we could borrow the tapestry for a while, but the immediate assumptions by commentators of British incompetence in the face of masterful French diplomacy are revealing.

So is our coverage of Macron’s recent gift of a horse to his Chinese hosts on a visit to Beijing. In the British press this has been universally praised as yet more brilliant Macronian statecraft.

Not so much in France. Commentators there have noted that in history, horses were given to all powerful Chinese emperors by vassal states in a sign of deference.

They have worried about the message this may have sent to China. Others in France have pointed out Macron’s name in Chinese means "horse vanquishes dragon" and feared his hosts would see the gift as a veiled insult.

Questioning our leaders’ competence is after all not the exclusive preserve of the British. But enjoying the spectacle of them being shown up by foreigners can lead to some dodgy conclusions and should not be encouraged.