Following the birth of Prince Archie in May 2019, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle had one sure way to claim the moral high ground over Prince William and Kate Middleton and the rest of the royal family.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were vehement about protecting the privacy of Archie and Lilibet. For security and other reasons, they would rarely share photos of their kids and they would never show their childrens’ faces, seemingly determined to end the tradition in which royal young ones are used to bolster the family-friendly image of the adults around them.
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This new foregrounding of red-headed Archie, 6, and Lilibet, 4, on Meghan’s social media coincides with the arrival of Stanford University graduate Meredith Maines, a seasoned communications strategist, to serve as the couple’s new chief communications officer. Maines started to work for the “Office of Prince Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex” in February, just before the premiere of Meghan’s Netflix show, “With Love, Meghan,” the Daily Mail reported at the time.
Several months later, the Daily Mail reported that Maines actually heads the couple’s new quasi-royal, Montecito-based household, which consists of their individual chiefs of staff, their PR team and employees involved in Meghan and Harry’s respective commercial endeavors, including Meghan’s As Ever brand. Moreover, The Telegraph reported last week that Maines recently oversaw yet another Sussex staff shake-up. It involved the departure of six communications employees and putting on retainer Method Communications, a U.S.-based media company, “to bolster” the couple’s PR operations after some bad press earlier in the year.
Since Maines reportedly brought Method Communications on board, Archie and Lilibet have been popping up so much more on Meghan’s Instagram — in 11 posts out of a total of 15 since late April.
In just the past week, they were the stars of a video showing a family trip to Disneyland and of a Father’s Day tribute that presented Harry cuddling them as babies or reading to them and playing with them as toddlers. In the Disneyland images, Archie and Lilibet were shot from behind, or their faces, per a common celebrity practice, were obscured with heart graphics. However, their faces, especially as babies, were partially or fully visible in the Father’s Day video.
“The Sussexes’ careful policy of ensuring the children were never fully seen or photographed appears to be at an end,” Daily Mail columnist Amanda Platell wrote. She called the Disneyland and Father’s Day images of Archie and Lilibet “enough of a tease” that it appears that Meghan and Harry are getting ready for a “big reveal” of their children.
Platell and the Telegraph also reported that Method may have advised Meghan on releasing other kid-related content that went viral: The extraordinary video of the duchess, heavily pregnant with Lilibet, dancing and twerking in a hospital room to help start labor. The video was met “with a mixture of incredulity and amusement” — and even renewed calls for King Charles III to strip them of their royal titles. In a podcast interview this week, Meghan insisted that sharing the video was her way “to be authentic.”
That may be true, but the video also got attention, some 42 million views, Platell said. Getting attention is always the point with anything that influencers post online. Platell also argued that Meghan’s apparent new practice of “flaunting” kid-related content may be a way she’ll make money, saying the duchess “already has a range of products on the market — and millions of views will do no harm at all to business.”
It’s not known how much Maines was involved in the details of posting the twerking video, though the Telegraph said she has been in charge of overseeing “many of the recent changes.” According to the Daily Mail, she is Harry and Meghan’s neighbor in Santa Barbara County, and her LinkedIn page said she previously worked at Google and Hulu and got her undergraduate and MA degrees in communications at Stanford University in 2006.
Curiously, the Telegraph also noted that Maines headed the latest communications-team shake up in the aftermath of Harry’s off-the-rails interview with the BBC in early May — an interview that Maines helped arrange, according to reports.
The interview came after Harry lost his court case to receive taxpayer-funded police security when he visits the U.K. The aggrieved son of King Charles III made all kinds of incendiary claims in the interview, alleging mistreatment by his father and supposed shadowy figures in the royal establishment who were in cahoots to “harm” him and his family by denying them appropriate levels of security for the few days each year they might be in the UK. Harry also alluded to his father’s cancer diagnosis and not knowing how much time he has left to live.
The Telegraph and the Times UK reported that the interview did not go down well with Buckingham Palace and probably wouldn’t help Harry’s desire to reconcile with his family or to regain his popularity with the British public. “It’s a wonder that anyone thought this would be a good idea,” Times U.K. assistant royal editor Kate Manley wrote at the time.
Maines apparently thought it was a good idea. Or she was goaded into it by Harry, who clearly was eager to unload on the royal establishment. The fact that Maines still has a job and is still in charge of the couple’s communications suggests that Harry — and perhaps Meghan — thought that the interview went down just as they had hoped.
Indeed, amid the fallout from the interview, Meghan issued what royal insiders saw as more than just a show of support for her husband. It was a “a giant (expletive) you” to the royal family and to the couple’s critics, as the Daily Mail’s royal correspondent Rebecca English reported at the time.
And, true to Meghan’s new strategy of including Archie and Lilibet in her social media messaging, she posted an Instagram photo of Harry walking in the garden of their Montecito mansion with the children. As is typical, the children were shot from behind, but that could change, as Platell noted. The image also seemed to broadcast that the Sussexes are their own, tight unit and that the children are key to communicating this message about who they are as a family.
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