Trooping the Colour: Why the royal event was the late Queen's favourite
The Daily T
The Telegraph
4.1 • 705 Ratings
🗓️ 6 June 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of Royal T: A Quick Cuppa, Associate Editor Camilla Tominey and The Telegraph’s Royal Editor, Hannah Furness, delve into the rich history, pomp, and pageantry of Trooping the Colour—historically celebrated as the late Queen Elizabeth II's favorite royal event.
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Producer: Emma Williams and Georgia Coan
Senior Producer: John Cadigan
Executive Producer: Charlotte Seligman
Video Producer: Will Walters
Studio Operator: Meghan Searle
Editor: Camilla Tominey
Highlights
- How the Sovereign's Birthday Parade maintains its strict, centuries-old traditions as a practical tribute to the British Armed Forces.
- How the Royal Family's balcony appearance for the flypast serves as the ultimate indicator of who is "in" and who is "out" of the royal fold.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Telegraph. |
| 0:07.1 | Welcome to the Royal Tea, a quick cupper, a brand new podcast serving up the very best royal insight from the experts in the know. |
| 0:15.1 | That's us. Me, Camilla Tominy. |
| 0:17.1 | And me, Hannah Finesse, the Telegraph's Royal Editor. |
| 0:19.4 | And ahead of trooping the colour, we'll be delving into the pomp and pageantry of the late Queen's favourite royal event. |
| 0:36.2 | Hannah, I've got a confession to make. |
| 0:39.0 | In all of the years that I was covering the royal family, |
| 0:41.9 | I never quite worked out what trooping the colour was all about. |
| 0:45.0 | It had something to do with the flag. |
| 0:46.8 | It had something to do with a regiment. |
| 0:49.0 | It's something to do with carriages and things. |
| 0:51.9 | Horsguards parade. |
| 0:53.5 | All of that effort, all of that pomp and pageantry and all we write about is the balcony. |
| 0:57.6 | Well, basically, it was like, who's in a carriage, who's wearing what? And we were lip reading balcony appearances. Oh, and obsessing over the flypast. |
| 1:06.1 | The flypast. But it is a massively significant royal event. The British Armed Forces train for ages for this. |
| 1:12.4 | It's a huge moment for everybody involved. |
| 1:14.7 | It goes back to Charles II, |
| 1:17.1 | where if you think about our troops assembling on foot or on horseback, |
| 1:21.2 | they had a flag which is called the colour, |
| 1:23.3 | and it would literally be trooped up and down in front of the men |
| 1:26.3 | with their muskets or their pikes and their swords so they know what it looked like. |
| 1:30.2 | So in the chaos of a real battle back then, they would look for their colour and they would gather around it. |
... |
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