PINK SLIPS

Harry and Meghan’s Abrasive Management Style Back in the Spotlight as They Ax Their Communications Heads

The Sussexes’ reputation has nosedived this year. Now, two employees are paying the price.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have fired their PR guys.

The couple sacked communications chiefs Charlie Gipson and Kyle Boulia, reportedly blaming them for failing to turn around routinely negative media coverage of the pair.

The couple have now hired a PR firm to manage their affairs. One of the new team’s first moves was to release last week’s twerking video.

On Friday, in the wake of the “purge,” a source told U.K. tabloid The Sun: “Meghan and Harry always blame everyone else and never themselves. No one ever seems to be good enough for them and yet they fail to understand why things don’t change.”

The paper added that two other staff members have also left in recent days, making a total of four departures. However The Telegraph said that a stunning six staff members had left, quit, or been fired in recent days.

The staffing changes will reignite criticism of Meghan’s famously abrasive management style; people who worked for her have previously told the Daily Beast she was a “demon” who had “psycho moments” as a boss.

Meghan is thought to have been behind a much-mocked effort in Us Weekly last year to paint her in a good light as a boss. The story was published after Prince Harry’s former chief of staff, Josh Kettler, parted company with Harry after just three months in the role. It featured Ashley Hansen, the duke and duchess’s global head of press at the time, as saying that when she had surgery, “I was met with the kind of concern and care a parent would express if it were their own child.”

The past year has arguably been the most disastrous yet in terms of reputation management for the duke and duchess, with recent PR fails by the couple including Vanity Fair’s brutal take-down of Meghan, the widespread derision with which her Netflix show was greeted, and the chaotic rebranding of American Riviera Orchard to As Ever.

The Sun said the firing of Gipson and Boulia, both hugely experienced and professional PR executives, was called “a purge” by insiders.

Messages to both individuals bounced.

The Sussexes’ new chief communications officer, Meredith Maines, told the Daily Beast: “As the Duke and Duchess’s business and philanthropic interests grow, I have made the strategic decision to move toward a more traditional communications structure of specialist agency support, as previously reported in Forbes and PR Week several weeks ago.”

She continued, “Transitioning from a team of two to an agency support staff of eight, operating across five different time zones, will give international media and stakeholders better access, and critically, faster response times to inquiries.”

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Tom SykesEuropean Editor at Large

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