On Dec. 26, a key employee of the Sussexes decided to take wing, flinging open the emergency exit, sprinting down the jet bridge, and taking her own “freedom flight” after just 10 months in Sussex towers.
Meredith Maines—whose LinkedIn page says that she was appointed the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s chief U.S. publicist in March 2025—confirmed to The Royalist in a statement on Dec. 26 that she has decided to leave the couple’s operation.
The official, unconvincing line is that it was all brilliant, but she quit because whatever work she was doing is now “concluded.”
There is a problem with the “mission accomplished” framing, though. Firstly, the Sussexes have had a terrible year PR-wise, and their reputation has sunk like a stone, which presumably wasn’t the aim. Secondly, nobody at the time of Maines’s appointment suggested she’d been brought in for a finite task.
Maines was not announced as a short-term fixer. This was a grown-up who would bring order to every part of a brand that has spent five years pinballing between reinvention, self-inflicted fiasco, and frantic damage control.
Maines is not a novice to be dazzled by titles. By any reasonable measure, she’s a serious operator, with comms experience in the pressure-cooker of places like Google and Hulu—big-name corporate worlds where the free snacks are less a perk than a strategy to keep you chained to your desk.
When people who have endured the “never leave the campus” culture decide they’d rather take their chances elsewhere, it tells you something palace courtiers know all too well: the job isn’t hard because of the press. It’s hard because of the “principals.”
The story is also the pattern. This is to say that Maines’s exit is just the latest in a long line of staffers who arrive with glossy résumés and depart a few months later, often accompanied by brief statements that read like they have been mailed in from a re-education camp.
The Sussex machine has become a place where senior professionals appear, attempt to impose structure, and then vanish, leaving behind a burning question: are Harry and Meghan simply impossible to work for?
A PR can survive, even shine, in a hostile press cycle. What they can’t easily survive is clients who won’t listen, or, worse, clients who lie to them and insist you push a narrative that collapses under basic scrutiny (see: the Kardashian social media consent form lie or the Sussex suggestion, repeated in the London Times, that Thomas Markle was possibly lying about having his leg amputated). When your brand is “compassion,” every messy example of human cruelty becomes a negative multiplier.
The clearest professional nightmare for any publicist is the moment your client forces you to double down on something that is demonstrably untrue. Then, the damage doesn’t just stick to the celebrity; it sticks to the publicist.
At that point you are not doing PR. You are trading your own reputation to protect theirs.
If you have a career to protect, you start doing the math: how many more “checkbox” debacles, how many more chaotic statements, how many more public contradictions can you front before your own name becomes synonymous with the s–tshow?
A competent comms chief can manage bad headlines. They can’t manage principals who keep handing the media new matches while soaked in gasoline.
2025 has been a masterclass in exactly that. The Sussexes’ big, glossy reset year has been defined by a rolling wave of self-initiated crises. There was a recurring theme of grand announcements and brand “resets” that resulted mostly in TikTok parodies and ridicule. The new product line launch was chaotic, self-aggrandizing awards were accepted, and then almost everyone at Archewell Philanthropies was fired (the charity now only has two full-time staff). The charity has now restructured.
“The Sussex office has been described in multiple high-profile reports as an intense environment… Meghan has always rejected the caricature. But 11 PRs in five years keeps the story alive.”
Archewell’s nebulous identity—jam, charity, productions, “philanthropies,” and whatever the next label might be—has created the sense of a shop constantly changing its sign because customers keep walking past.
Even the charitable posture has become a target of suspicion, partly because the couple’s public work so often comes with a camera crew in tow.
Looming over everything this year was the aura of total inauthenticity. This was brilliantly illustrated by a set of jam tongs being held the wrong way round in an Instagram photo meant to promote Meghan’s authentic love of jam making. There is a lingering sense that their public posture is engineered—manufactured compassion, curated kindness—while very human meanness keeps leaking out around the edges.
And there’s another dynamic at play: money. The spigot gushed less powerfully this year. The Royalist understands that the Sussexes will not replace Maines with another full-time U.S.-based comms chief.
Instead, the U.K.-based Liam Maguire—like Harry, Maguire has a military background—appears set to take a bigger role. If you are trying to cut costs, eliminating a huge senior American salary is an efficient way to do it. But if you are trying to run a California-based celebrity operation, having your comms lead on London time obviously carries a risk of burnout. This is not the kind of workload that would be recommended by, say, BetterUp, the holistic coaching group that Harry works for.
Which brings us to the most corrosive element of all: Meghan the demon boss.
The Sussex office has been described in multiple high-profile reports as an intense environment—high pressure, rapidly shifting expectations, code-red alerts over minor issues, and staffers saying the experience was emotionally draining. Meghan has always rejected the caricature. But 11 PRs in five years keeps the story alive.
The narrative is highly resistant to spin because every time they deny it, another senior person leaves. They say it was a short-term contract, but then the next one also turns out to be short-term, and the one after that. The pattern becomes the evidence.
You can attempt the grand counter-offensive—anonymous briefings about how kind and wonderful the boss is—but when the messengers are paid-up staffers, the testimonials land as forced.
What would a rational crisis strategy look like now, if you were brought in to salvage what can be salvaged?
The answer is simple, and unlikely to happen: stop.
Stop everything.
No more constant output, no more frantic self-mythologizing, no more lifestyle rebrands, heroic narratives, or staged compassion.
Six months of silence.
But that strategy requires the one ingredient Meghan has rarely demonstrated: restraint.
It also requires trusting professionals, taking advice, and recognizing that sometimes the most powerful PR move is simply not doing anything.
Maines’s voluntary departure suggests, again, that Meghan and Harry would not listen to her. And so, the story rolls on, not because The Daily Mail is cruel (it can be) or because social media is toxic (it is), but because the Sussex brand continues to produce its own ghastly weather.
In a world where many people cling to prestigious jobs despite workplace misery, the Sussex job has become the rare gig that makes seasoned veterans decide, cheerfully and publicly (as Elvis Costello once sang) that they would rather be anywhere else than here today.
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