"In 1977, on the occasion of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, I cracked a teen-ager’s smile when Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, and their fellow punk pranksters hired a barge of their own on the Thames, loaded it up with booze, floated it towards the House of Parliament, and bellowed out the first verse of their new single—'God Save the Queen / the Fascist regime / they made you a moron / potential H-bomb'—only for some of them to get arrested for disturbing the peace. In those days, the monarchy seemed to symbolize all that was restricting and stultifying and class-bound about Britain. But even then, I feel obliged to recall, the Queen herself was popular with ordinary people up and down the country. 'Feck them all, the English government and the Royal Family—they raped and desolated us,' my Irish grandmother, a woman of stoutly Fenian views, would say whenever she saw the Queen appear on the television. 'But, oh she’s nice. Let me see her.'"
John Cassidy at The New Yorker considers Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee.
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