If your boss is a royal pain, take some solace: At least they’re not an actual royal.
Such is the pain of being an employee of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex — the grift artists formerly known as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle — that one report has their employees referring to the duchess as a “dictator” and the duke an “enabler” of her horrid behavior.
The anonymous report on life inside the Sussex’s California operation came from The Hollywood Reporter after yet another unexpected departure from their team last month.
Just before the couple embarked on their trip to Colombia, Josh Kettler — a U.S.-based consultant that had been the chief of staff for the Sussexes — left the employ of the duo.
Kettler had only been on the job for three months and had, according to the U.K. Daily Mail, been brought on to “guide” Prince Harry “through his next phase” in life out in sunny California as things soured for him in Merrie England.
Kettler was at least the 18th high-level employee to leave the employ of the royal couple since they wed in 2018.
“What may be most telling is that the entire time I worked there, I don’t think I heard a single current or former employee on their staff say they would take the job again if given the chance,” one former employee of the duo told the Daily Mail at the time.
“These aren’t employees they had just found off the streets,” they added.
“Many of them are people who had previously excelled working for demanding bosses in high-performance companies and environments.”
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The Hollywood Reporter’s item about last month’s departure, published Thursday, gave further insight into what some of those ex-employees in the “Sussex Survivors Club” have to say about the dysfunction within the Windsors’ Golden State annex.
“Why’d they all leave? What explains the churn?” THR’s report asked. Pretty simple, actually: the distaff member of the couple’s temper, combined with her husband’s willingness to just go along with it.
“Everyone’s terrified of Meghan,” a source said.
“She belittles people, she doesn’t take advice. They’re both poor decision-makers, they change their minds frequently. Harry is a very, very charming person — no airs at all — but he’s very much an enabler. And she’s just terrible.”
So terrible, in fact, she’s earned a humiliating nickname among employees.
“In 2018 Markle’s treatment of two royal aides prompted Buckingham Palace to investigate the then-princess for ‘bullying behavior.’ Though the results of the inquiry were never released, Markle denounced the effort as a ‘calculated smear campaign,’” THR noted.
“But some of the couple’s stateside staff-members also reserve special bile for Markle, whose reported penchant for noisy tantrums and angry 5 a.m. emails has earned her the in-house moniker ‘Duchess Difficult.’
“‘She’s absolutely relentless,’ says one source. ‘She marches around like a dictator in high heels, fuming and barking orders. I’ve watched her reduce grown men to tears.’”
Meanwhile, contrast this with a quote from Meghan on her “Archetypes” podcast: “I find myself cowering and tiptoeing into a room and – the thing I find most embarrassing – when you’re saying a sentence and the intonation goes up, like it’s a question. And you’re like, ‘Oh my God, stop stop like whispering and tiptoeing around it. Just say what it is that you need. You’re allowed to set a boundary. You’re allowed to be clear, it doesn’t make you demanding. It doesn’t make you difficult, it makes you clear.’”
Right. Which is why high-performing employees are leaving your staff like you and your husband are Enron and it’s currently November of 2001: because you’re being “clear.” That’s totally it.
Now, we lost up to 70,000 of our men on the battlefield and the equivalent of 18,523,000 cups of tea in Boston Harbor so that Americans didn’t have to care to about the whims of the British royals, and we’ve largely been successful at avoiding them since the end of the 18th century.
The problem is that Britain’s primary export since the days of empire ended has been its pop culture, something the House of Windsor has become annoyingly enmeshed in. “God save the queen / ‘Cause tourists are money!” Johnny Rotten sneered all the way back in 1977 — and one suspects the Sex Pistols’ most infamous song wasn’t banned from British radio because it was offensive, but rather because that unpleasant bedrock truth hit a nerve inside Buckingham Palace.
Thus, we have the Sussexes embedded in America, culturally and physically — apparently, we can’t even return them to sender — and both exemplifying and amplifying two of the worst trends of the 21st century: rampant celebrity entitlement and vapid therapy culture.
Despite her frequent contretemps with the British tabloids, Prince Harry’s mother was dubbed “The People’s Princess.” His wife, an actress who manages to present a pleasant face in public? “Duchess Difficult.”
My guess is, that’s not the result of a “calculated smear campaign” from Buckingham Palace, since it’s not like King Charles has the free time to bludgeon random people in California into quitting on the off-chance it’ll inspire current and/or former employees of his spare heir’s spouse to bequeath her a nasty nickname. Instead, my guess is that, yeah, it’s the tantrums and the 5 a.m. emails from someone who believes that her social visibility makes her important enough to get away with acting like this.
Meanwhile, on the other front, Prince Harry continues his years-long primal scream therapy session against daddy and big bro, looking even more miserable the more he unloads off his chest. Markle talks about the empowerment of being “clear” and how it doesn’t make you “difficult” — but plenty of highly remunerated, highly effective individuals aren’t quite digging her female empowerment trip and have decided to make their opinions “clear” by getting far away from her.
Point being, from all reports — and almost no sources actively rebutting them — these people stink. Keir Starmer, take note: Your former colonies on the American continent now have a whole slew of armed unmanned aerial vehicles with quite a bit of range, and we’re not afraid to use them. Your people still like tea, and you assumedly ship it in from around the world. These vehicles give us a great deal more reach than we did in 1773, when Boston Harbor was the best we could do.
All I’m saying is, if you don’t take these two insufferable toddlers with royal titles back, you never know where this might lead. Nudge nudge, wink wink, as another one of your (more favorably received) cultural exports might say.
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