Prince Harry says a joke from Meghan Markle landed in a dead silence at Trooping the Colour in 2019, when Kate Middleton asked for her thoughts on the parade and Markle answered, “Colorful.” Harry wrote that the exchange came during their first public appearance as newlyweds, just after a 10-day honeymoon, and that the moment was followed by an awkwardness that hung in the air.
The detail is back in focus because it puts one small exchange at the center of a much bigger royal rift. Harry and Meghan had only recently returned from their honeymoon when the moment unfolded at Trooping the Colour, the military parade held to mark the birthday of the British sovereign, with Markle in a Carolina Herrera baby pink outfit and Harry in a military uniform.
Harry described Middleton’s question as simple enough. Markle was attending the event for the first time, and Middleton asked what she thought of it. The answer was brief, and Harry later said it was met by “a yawning silence threatened to swallow us all whole.” It was the kind of line that reads like a joke until the room stops laughing. In Harry’s account, the reply did not produce easy banter; it produced a pause that said more than any polished royal exchange could have.
Yet the same memoir passage also softens the picture. Harry said Markle went on to spend time with the Queen a few days later and that the two got along really well, bonding over dogs and, Markle later told him, motherhood. That makes the awkward moment with Middleton harder to read as a simple insult or clash. It looks more like a family conversation that missed its footing before the next engagement briefly smoothed things over.
The broader backdrop is harder to ignore. Harry and Meghan moved to California in 2020 and have not returned to the UK since, with security concerns cited as the reason. The source also says 2025 marked the third year in a row that they were not invited to Trooping the Colour. That leaves the old exchange in place as part memory, part marker of a relationship that never fully reset. The unanswered question is not what Markle said. It is why a single word could sit so heavily in a family that has spent years trying, and failing, to sound casual around one another.
