Queen visits £3.2bn ‘Big Lizzie’ warship as she’s seen for first time since Harry fired attacks

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The Queen has visited Royal Navy flagship HMS Queen Elizabeth in her first public appearance since Prince Harry‘s latest bombshell comments which accused the Royal Family of ‘total neglect’. 

The monarch, 95, toured the £3billion warship, which is affectionally called ‘Big Lizzie’, on Saturday in a tumultuous week for the Royal Family which saw Prince Harry drop another ‘truth bomb’ in an Apple TV+ series.

The Royal Navy’s flagship vessel is set to depart for Asia later on Saturday to begin a 28-week operational deployment which will see it carry out visits to 40 countries including India, Japan, and Singapore.  

Meanwhile, Prince William visited the General Assembly in Edinburgh soon after launching an attack on the BBC where he slammed them for ruining Princess Diana’s life after her Panorama interview with ‘rogue reporter’ Martin Bashir in 1995.

Despite the eventful week, the Queen returned to work she chatted with the ship’s commanding officer Captain Angus Essenhigh, and Commodore Stephen Moorhouse, commander of the UK Carrier Strike Group (CSG), as she arrived by helicopter at Portsmouth Naval Base.

The Queen is still mourning the loss of her beloved husband of 73 years, who sadly passed away on April 9 aged 99, and paid tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh on Saturday by wearing a scarab brooch which was gifted to her by him.

She was also left ‘devastated’ after her five-month-old puppy Dorgi, Fergus, who was ‘bought by Prince Andrew’ to help her cope while the Duke of Edinburgh was recovering from heart surgery in hospital, died this month.

It came five weeks after the Queen said goodbye to her ‘strength and stay’ and Britain’s longest-serving consort Prince Philip in St George’s Chapel. 

But the Queen put on a brave face during her tour of the HMS Queen Elizabeth, where she cut a sophisticated figure in a rouge military style cashmere jacket and a matching bowler hat, which was embellished with a stunning floral piece.

As well as touring the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the monarch also presented the 15 years long service and good conduct medal to Petty Officer Matthew Ready. She stepped on-board the warship just one day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited the flagship.

The ship’s deployment will cover 26,000 nautical miles travelling through the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, then from the Gulf of Aden to the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean to the Philippine Sea. 

The deployment has been organised as part of the ‘UK’s tilt to the Indo-Pacific region’ in a bid to ‘bolster deep defence partnerships’ as well as to take part in an exercise to mark the 50th anniversary of the Five Powers Defence Agreement with Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. 

The CSG will carry out visits to 40 countries including India, Japan, South Korea and Singapore with more than 70 engagements, including sailing alongside the French carrier Charles De Gaulle in the Mediterranean. 

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the deployment ‘will be flying the flag for Global Britain – projecting our influence, signalling our power, engaging with our friends and reaffirming our commitment to addressing the security challenges of today and tomorrow’. 

The Queen smiled and chatted with Royal Navy personnel on the warship soon after her grandson, 36, accused the royal family of ‘total neglect’, bullying and even a smear campaign against his wife Meghan, 39. 

In his latest attack, part of a series on mental health for Apple TV+ with his friend Oprah Winfrey, the former royal suggested his father, Prince Charles, had allowed his children to ‘suffer’ when it came to the media because of his own negative experiences.

His comments came on the five-episode The Me You Can’t See series – part-televised therapy session and self-help guide, part-confessional – which was released in its entirety yesterday. It contains a number of ‘truth bombs’, an insider told the New York Post earlier this week.

In the documentary, Harry described how Meghan shared her darkest thoughts with him, including ‘the practicalities’ of how she had considered ending her life.

He said: ‘I felt completely helpless. I thought my family would help – but every single ask, request, warning, whatever it is, just got met with total silence or total neglect.’

Harry was billed as an executive producer alongside Miss Winfrey, who originally bagged the lucrative Apple deal. But it also included large segments of him in conversation with the chat show host, as well as interspersed footage of Harry at his mother’s funeral and her being chased by paparazzi as a young woman. 

It set the tone for what was another slew of accusations against the Royal Family, the monarchy and the British media. 

Harry told how frightened he was by Meghan’s ‘clarity of thought’ about how she wanted to kill herself when she was six months pregnant with their son Archie. Going back to his childhood, the prince talked in moving terms of how much he had been scarred by the loss of his mother. 

The Duke of Sussex was just 12 when Diana, Princess of Wales, died in August 1997 in a car crash while being pursued by the press in Paris.

In the first three episodes of Apple TV’s The Me You Can’t See, the royal addressed traumatic memories from his childhood including the moment he was famously photographed with his brother, father, uncle and grandfather walking behind Diana’s coffin at her funeral. 

He said it was his wife who persuaded him, after a row in which she said he had regressed back to his 12-year-old self – the age at which he lost his mother – to seek professional help. This included Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR).

The fear of losing his wife and raising Archie alone ‘was one of the biggest reasons to leave the UK’, he added. 

Harry also claimed that ‘forces were working against us’ as they attempted to quit as working royals, but that he and Meghan were proud of what they had achieved and ‘had no regrets’. 

He said at the time that he was ‘feeling trapped and feeling controlled through fear both by the media and by the system itself, which never encouraged the talking about this kind of trauma… But certainly now I will never be bullied into silence.’ 

Harry, referring to the racism he believed Meghan experienced in the UK, also suggested his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, had been hounded to death because she was dating ‘someone that wasn’t white’ – Dodi Fayed. Buckingham Palace and Clarence House were last night retaining what sources described as a ‘dignified silence’ on the claims. 

An exasperated insider recently told the Mail the Royal Family appeared to be at the end of their tether over Harry’s never-ending forays from across the Atlantic and that relationships were hanging by a thread.

They said: ‘Everyone is struggling to understand what he gets from, or hopes to achieve, by interventions like this. It is perfectly possible to campaign effectively on the issue of mental health without talking in such intimate detail about his own experiences.’ 

The Apple TV series was released in full online just four hours after his brother Prince William, 38, issued an extraordinary attack on the BBC for ruining Princess Diana’s life after her Panorama interview with ‘rogue reporter’ Martin Bashir in 1995. 

The Duke of Cambridge said Bashir’s deceit in obtaining his 1995 interview with Princess Diana hastened his parents’ divorce and ‘hurt countless others’ in an unprecedented broadside against the shamed BBC.

His brother Prince Harry – who is based in California – also responded to Lord Dyson’s damning report into how the interview was obtained, saying his mother ‘lost her life because of this’.

The Duke of Sussex thanked those who took ‘some form of accountability’ for ‘owning it’, but said ‘the ripple effect of a culture of exploitation and unethical practices ultimately took [Diana’s] life’.

In a recent statement, Prince William laid bare his ‘indescribable sadness’ that his precious final years with his mother had been marred by the isolation the historic Panorama interview caused. 

What ‘saddens’ him the most was that should a 1996 investigation into claims Diana was hoodwinked by Bashir have been conducted ‘properly’, the princess would have known she was ‘deceived’ prior to her death in 1997, he claimed.

He said the interview now held ‘no legitimacy’, had established a ‘false narrative’ for 25 years, and the BBC’s failings had let his mother, his family and the public down.