The Trooping the Colour booing is tearing across social media and depending on who you ask, a clip from Saturday either captured a royal humiliation or a wildly misleading edit.
The video, which has racked up more than nine million views, shows Kate Middleton riding in a carriage with her three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis, as boos can be heard somewhere in the crowd. The post pushing it claimed the Princess of Wales looked “angry,” the kids looked “uncomfortable and confused,” and that the family was being booed “if looks could kill.”
But the version going viral leaves out almost everything that matters about what actually happened in London yesterday.
What The Trooping The Colour Booing Was Actually About
The boos were real, but they didn’t come from a turning crowd. According to several UK outlets, including The Express and The Standard, a small group of anti-monarchy protesters booed during parts of the procession, and the loudest reporting centered on King Charles and Queen Camilla, not Kate and her children.
The protest also wasn’t about the Wales family. Many demonstrators, organized in part by the anti-monarchy group Republic, were focused on Prince Andrew and the Epstein scandal, carrying signs referencing Andrew and placards demanding answers about what the palace knew. “Not My King” signs were spotted throughout. In other words, this was a pointed political demonstration aimed at the institution, one that happened to be audible as the carriages rolled past.
The Part The Viral Clip Skips
Plenty of people who watched the full broadcast pushed back hard on the “booed family” framing. Royal supporters argued the boos came from a small minority and were drowned out by the broad cheers that filled the route, where thousands of fans turned out to wave the family on, the same crowd that warmly received Kate’s quiet tribute to Princess Diana the same day. Much of the chatter around the Trooping the Colour booing, they noted, came from accounts already critical of the royals. One widely shared response went further, claiming the circulating clip had been altered: “This didn’t happen.“
There’s also the uncomfortable fact at the center of it all that three children, who didn’t choose any of this, keep landing in the middle of a very public political fight. Whatever anyone thinks of the monarchy, reading “anger” into a parent’s face and “humiliation” into kids waving from a carriage is a stretch the footage can’t actually prove.
For now, what’s verifiable is narrow is that protesters booed, the demonstration was largely about Andrew, and the Trooping the Colour booing was spun into a viral story about a family being jeered. The rest is interpretation, and a lot of it is being disputed.
