In the months leading up to ‘Megxit’, there was an eerie silence about the Sussexes’ status within The Firm – but one senior royal could sense the quiet before the storm.
Prince William, now 43, knew his younger brother, Prince Harry, now 41, well enough to predict the ‘wheels were going to fall off’ ahead of what became his and wife, Meghan Markle’s eventual exit from the Royal Family.
Royal author Tina Brown said that while Harry’s union with the American actress was initially seen as a ‘victory over entrenched attitudes towards race and class’, the hope for a ‘harmoniously integrated’ family evaporated 18 months later.
And the future King seemed to have a premonition of how bad things were going to get, the former Vanity Fair editor wrote in her book Palace Papers.
Then the Duke of Cambridge, William, asked a trusted, retired Palace aide to ‘come back for a bit’ to help contain the fallout from the schism later ‘styled Megxit’.
‘In November 19, a Palace old hand, now retired, spoke to the Duke of Cambridge at a charity function in London,’ Ms Brown wrote in the Sunday Times bestseller that was released in April 2022.
‘William apparently said to him with a worried air, “We may need you to come back for a bit. I’m afraid the wheels are going to fall off with Harry.”‘
According to Ms Brown, the term ‘Megxit’ is misleading because the decision to quit the Royal Family was Prince Harry’s ‘with acceleration from Meghan’.
The royal biographer compared the Sussexes’ exit from the Royal Family to the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, noting it was ‘executed with maximum chaos’.
She alleged the Sussexes had vetted Canada, where Meghan had lived and worked for several years, and South Africa, where Prince Harry had always dreamed of living, as possible ‘new homes’ months after their May 2018 wedding.
Recalling a conversation with a Palace staffer, Ms Brown said they suggested the best thing Meghan could do for Prince Harry was ‘take him out of royal life’ because he had been miserable ‘for so long’.
The ex-aide is believed to have told Ms Brown: ‘He needed a wife to come in and say, “Actually, the best thing for you is that I take you out of this.”’
According to Ms Brown’s source, senior royals were ‘supportive’ of Harry and Meghan’s decision to quit The Firm, as long as it was ‘done properly’ and ‘set the right precedent’.
Prince William reportedly believed that the way his younger brother’s departure from the Royal Family could impact future generations, including his and Catherine’s three children.
While promoting his memoir in January 2023, Prince Harry told The Telegraph his reasons for speaking out about his experiences as the Royal Family’s ‘spare’ cut straight to the heart of his personality as ‘someone who likes to fix things’.
‘If I see a pattern of behaviour that is harming people, I will do everything I can to try and change it,’ the Duke of Sussex said.
Harry said that he feels a ‘responsibility’ towards his nephews and niece ‘knowing that out of those three children, at least one will end up like me, the spare’.
When he voiced these concerns to William, the future King is believed to have ‘made it very clear that the children are not his responsibility’ – although helping their daughter Charlotte navigate her position as ‘spare’ has remained a key priority for the Waleses.
In fact, royal experts have suggested William and Catherine are actively trying to ‘break the cycle’ of heir and spare by giving their children as ‘normal’ an upbringing as possible.
Speaking in a Channel 5 documentary, Ailsa Anderson, former press secretary to Queen Elizabeth II, said the future will be different for the youngest successors because they are being raised as equals – a ‘key to unpacking and shifting expectations of our heirs and spares’.
She added that they would have more ‘freedom and choice than their father had’.
While the royal couple are believed to have it ‘all worked out’ when it comes to avoiding the pitfalls of royal hierarchies, they could not control the ‘Megxit’ spiral, Ms Brown suggested.
‘Like any divorce, much of the conflict came down to money and, as usual in this saga, there were hot temperaments and cold misunderstandings,’ she wrote.
According to Ms Brown, the ‘half-in, half-out’ royal role that Harry and Meghan had envisioned ‘threw up multiple conflicts of interest’ that were evident to everybody except them.
Among them was the tricky task of ‘delineating’ commercial activities and royal duties.
‘If, say, the high-visibility couple tacked a few days of shooting a paid Netflix documentary onto the back of a Foreign Office-funded Commonwealth tour, there would be an uproar.’
Even if there was a clear distinction between the Sussexes’ money-making ventures and those undertaken as members of the royal family, it was still their status as members of the British monarchy that was ‘being sold’, she continued.
Another challenge with the Sussexes’ part-time arrangement was their desire to champion causes they believed in freely – but, asked Ms Brown, ‘what if those causes were controversial’?
Members of the Royal Family are required to maintain a politically neutral stance but, in November 2021, Meghan rang up two Republican Senators in her capacity as ‘Duchess of Sussex’ and asked them to ‘lobby for paid family leave’.
One of the senators, Susan Collins, said she found Meghan’s request ‘ironic’ considering the Firm’s ‘pledge to be apolitical’.
Finally, the question of voter-funded police protection for Harry, Meghan, and their children, Prince Archie, six, and Princess Lilibet, four, were – and continue to be – a major point of contention.
These issues all boiled down to a single dilemma, Ms Brown suggested.
‘Whether the Sussexes were celebrity royals or royal celebrities, two very different states of being,’ she wrote.
‘A royal is representing Crown and country. A celebrity is representing himself or herself.
‘The summer of 2019 confirmed to the media that the Sussexes had made the decisive and deadly pivot to the meretricious side of the equation.’
The air of optimism surrounding the Sussexes’s independent ventures has also dissipated in the wake of ‘Megxit’ while the couple navigate a staff exodus amid claims they are ‘unravelling at speed’.
After Netflix ‘downgraded’ its streaming deal with them, and Spotify ended their partnership with the Sussexes’ production company, Harry and Meghan have lost two key members of staff within days.
Harry’s right-hand-man James Holt, the couple’s ‘rock’ through Megxit, the publication of Spare and beyond, has quit to return to Britain to raise his family.
And Meredith Maines, the couple’s communications chief, left weeks after the couple suffered a backlash over deleted Instagram pictures of them partying with the Kardashians.
Ms Maines is the fifth person in their PR machine to leave in 2025. The couple have now lost 12 advisers in recent years, including one who preferred a job in insurance and others who scrubbed all mention of their Sussex-related jobs from their CVs.
Mark Borkowski, one of the UK’s leading PR gurus and crisis managers, told the Daily Mail that the loss of Mr Holt and Ms Maines tops off a disastrous end to 2025 for the Sussexes’ ‘celebrity-led brand’.
They are firmly in ‘survival’ mode because of scandals and their own missteps, he said. He claims that in the modern world ‘reputation doesn’t unravel slowly. It buckles at speed’ – and this very much applies to them.
