The Diamond Jubilee pageant was front page news, or at the very least a front page picture, around the world, with many newspapers pursuing angles of the story unreported in Britain.
Of course they mentioned the weather. “Royal jubilé sur la Tamise, malgré la pluie et le froid” (“Royal Jubilee on the Thames, despite the rain and cold”) said Le Monde. “Queen reigns on her parade” punned the New York Post, with a characteristically punchy sub-head: “Diamond Jubilee is a flotilla thrilla.” La Repubblica even reached for the cliché about London fog, a phenomenon that has not been seen in Britain since the start of the Queen’s reign.
The New York Times correspondent began his report with a reference to a million people “braving a day of bone-chilling, rain-dampened weather”. One suspects that he is struggling with his posting to London, for in his second paragraph he returned to “the familiar miseries of the British climate”.
He called the pageant “stirring” before describing Britain’s fortunes: “A fading imperial power when Queen Elizabeth took the throne, Britain now stands, by its own measure, in the second rank of nations, measuring its status by accomplishments in arts and sciences more than its diminished international clout. Yet the Queen has provided a sense of stability that has made the changes easier to accept.”
In South Africa, The Mercury said that the Diamond Jubilee inevitably focused attention “anew on the huge anomaly of monarchy in a democratic age. How is it that a hereditary monarch inspires such loyalty across the spectrum, to a degree no politician could hope for? It’s as if people have an instinctive trust for the monarchy.”
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El País suggested that the Royal Family had recovered from tumultuous times in the 1990s because they had an ability to reinvent themselves and now behaved in a less elitist fashion.
“The Ultimate Street Party” blared the Jamaica Observer, noting that festivities in the Queen’s international realms did not match those at her Coronation. “Nonetheless, the Queen deserves the adulation that she has been given on her Diamond Jubilee.”
The editorial in Melbourne’s Herald Sun was generous to the Queen while expressing republican sentiments. “Australia will become a republic one day, but that does not detract from the great affection in which the Queen is held by so many Australians,” it said.
There was envy at the festivities at The Telegraph of Calcutta, where above a picture of the pageant they asked: “When will our Thames aka Hooghly look like this?” This was a reference to the Hooghly River, a distributary of the Ganges.
In Germany, Bild concentrated on the Duchess of Cambridge’s red dress, which it believed was very similar to one once worn by Kim Kardashian, the D-list American celebrity.
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The front page of Daily Nation in Barbados went for the local angle: a jubilee party in Christ Church which featured two men dressed as British traffic wardens who apparently thrilled crowds by handing out fake parking tickets.