A balcony exchange from Kate Middleton Trooping The Colour in 2019 is circulating again after footage appeared to show Prince Harry telling Meghan Markle to turn around just before the National Anthem began. The clip, replayed as this year’s annual ceremony approaches, has revived one of the most talked-about royal moments of the Sussexes’ time on the Buckingham Palace balcony.
The footage shows Harry glancing inside the room beside the balcony before speaking to someone off camera. Meghan then turns her head slightly and mouths something before facing her husband, and the pair exchange a few words. She turns back once more, Harry appears to say “turn around,” and the moment ends just a second or so before the anthem starts playing.
Seen without sound, the exchange was widely read at the time as awkward or strained. With the audio enabled, it looks more likely Harry was simply warning Meghan that the National Anthem was about to begin. That small shift matters because the balcony has long been one of the most scrutinized places in royal life, where a glance or a gesture can be replayed for years after the event itself has passed.
The 2019 Trooping the Colour was the last time Harry and Meghan attended the annual ceremony. They were on the Buckingham Palace balcony alongside the late Queen Elizabeth, then Prince Charles, Camilla, William, Kate and their three children among others, and Archie had arrived only the month before. Harry and Meghan also attended in 2018, before stepping back from royal duties in 2020.
Trooping the Colour is due to get underway on Saturday, with senior members of the Royal Family gathering on the Buckingham Palace balcony during the RAF flypast for King Charles’s birthday celebrations. Harry and Meghan will not be there, which gives fresh weight to a clip that keeps returning because it captures both the intimacy and the distance that have since defined their public lives.
What remains unresolved is not whether the balcony moment was dramatic, but how easily it was misread. The new audio does not answer what Meghan mouthed to Harry before he spoke, yet it does strip away much of the tension that hung over the clip when it first spread online.
