If you think you had a fractious Christmas, spare a thought for Harry and Meghan, who’ve just been dumped by their chief communications officer, Meredith Maines. Maines is their 11th publicist to step down in five years. Her stint leading “all external communications” began in March 2025, making her the proxy who met with King Charles’ comms secretary for not-so-secret peace talks in July. She was also the unnamed “The Sussexes’ chief communications officer sits between us” mentioned in Meghan’s cover interview with US Harper’s Bazaar last month — so very much a right-hand woman, in a close working relationship with both Harry and Meghan, in a role stretched across their philanthropic works, merch-flogging, and controlling the narratives about the family estrangement on both sides.
Maines stuck it out longer than many — their director of communications, Emily Robinson, only managed June-October this year, and has since scrubbed those few months from her LinkedIn page, so it wasn’t because working for Harry and Meghan springboarded her career upwards at great speed. The Sussexes are also missing from the LinkedIn page of ex-chief of staff Josh Kettler, who was hired to steer Harry’s ship in particular. Other PR staff to have left include Ashley Hansen, who worked for the Sussexes between May 2022 and October 2024 as their global press secretary; Kyle Boulia (April 2024-June 2025); European communications director Charlie Gipson (April 2024-July 2025); press secretary then head of communications Toya Holness, aka “Meghan’s shadow” (October 2020-May 2022); Christine Schirmer (2020-2023); Miranda Barbot (2021-2024); and Deesha Tank (June 2022-2025).
Kettler lasted just three months. I lasted four on a completely unpaid internship with a fashion stylist, during which I wasn’t allowed to eat during 12-hour shoot days, so what kind of behaviour sends someone packing after three months? “Even in business, I want us to play and have fun and explore and be creative,” said Meghan of working with her husband in that Harper’s Bazaar interview, but it doesn’t sound as if that’s the office culture they’ve achieved thus far.
• Hilary Rose: Harry and Meghan are lovely to their staff, OK?
Unlike Harry, Meghan had normal teenage jobs, including at a fro-yo shop called Humphrey Yogart, so she will have extensive experience in being treated as less than human — my own teen years in a café, waitressing at a rugby stadium, and working in a regional branch of Ted Baker (someone soiled the trousers that they were trying on in our changing room during a particularly memorable shift) were invaluable in teaching me not to be a prick to people just doing their jobs. But perhaps if you’re paying enough yes-people around you — especially if you’re paying them mostly with money inherited, rather than hard-earned — you lose perspective quickly.
In his book, Spare, Harry wrote that an “assistant was asked to resign by Palace HR after we showed them evidence she’d traded on her position with Meg to get freebies”. Having been a fashion editor in the past, I know grifting when I see it, but I wonder where that particular act ranks in the grand scheme of accepting freebies. According to Tina Brown’s book The Palace Papers, Meghan’s team emailed a publicist to “make sure [the recipient] knows that she can still send me anything. She has always been one of the good ones,” following her wedding in 2018, since royals are usually expected to refuse designer gifts.
That restriction, or the pretence of it, ended with their official roles — and I haven’t seen either of them wearing Marks & Spencer since. Despite the public messaging that they’re struggling to afford to fund their own private security, the belt-tightening didn’t apply to the belts themselves. I doubt their staff were on minimum wage, but they obviously weren’t paid enough that they chose to stick it out even a year, and even in the current economic crisis.
• Meghan a great boss? My Palace sources said otherwise
I once had a boss who’d grown up wealthy — not hard to find in the London media — laugh when I requested a pay rise, and tell me that it was my feckless decision to rent a flat in the London property market that was the problem, not my salary, because “everyone knows renting is a rip-off, so you should stop wasting money and buy”. This is the kind of practical financial advice that you can expect from rich people, especially in a world in which rich friends pop out of the woodwork to lend you their houses — like the actor Tyler Perry, who lent Harry and Meghan his eight-bedroom Tuscan-style villa in LA when they resigned from their official Palace titles.
When Harry and Meghan gave up being royals, it wasn’t to live a normal life: it was to live a celebrity life. Busy working parents don’t fly to Paris for Balenciaga fashion shows; philanthropists don’t invite Harper’s Bazaar to watch them do good works; people who just want to be left alone don’t sell access to their lives. We can see from the Netflix contracts, the tell-all memoirs, the merchandise, that Harry and Meghan are striving for a Kardashian lifestyle, not a quiet one. So perhaps the problem isn’t them, as much as the job spec not matching the actual job. Their emphasis on the positive change they want to be in the world has brought them staff from philanthropic and business backgrounds, rather than teams used to navigating celebrity scandals, celebrity drama, and celebrity behaviour. They poached one chief of staff from Bill and Melinda Gates, so can we be surprised if she didn’t find the same sense of fulfilment working on Harry and Meghan’s Archewell non-profit as she did redirecting the Gates’ donated billions? What Harry and Meghan really needed for Christmas is a Hollywood publicist referral, ideally someone who specialises in nearly-but-never-quite cancelled A-listers.
