HMS Queen Elizabeth sets sail at dusk after visit by the monarch

The Royal Navy flagship HMS Queen Elizabeth set sail at dusk last night after the monarch flew onto the £3 billion aircraft carrier by helicopter to wish the crew luck ahead of their first deployment.

Hundreds of people lined the harbour walls to wave off the warship as it set off from Portsmouth Naval Base for the 28-week deployment by the Carrier Strike Group (CSG) to the Indo-Pacific region which will cover 26,000 nautical miles.

The Queen was welcomed by the ship’s commanding officer Captain Angus Essenhigh, and Commodore Stephen Moorhouse, commander of the UK CSG, after arriving by helicopter while the 65,000 tonne ship was still at base.

She was given a briefing on the deployment which will take the CSG 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 Queen also had a chance to meet some of the 1,700 personnel on board the carrier which include Royal Navy sailors, Royal Air Force airmen and women, Royal Marines, and 250 United States personnel.

Her hour-long visit followed a tour by Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Friday.

She was wearing a brick-red military-style cashmere coat with a black velvet collar and buttons, over a crepe wool dress by Stewart Parvin and a Rachel Trevor-Morgan hat. 

The visit was her first public appearance since Prince Harry‘s latest bombshell comments which accused the Royal Family of ‘total neglect’. 

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

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. 

It is understood that the Queen is keen to recommence more public engagements in the coming months instead of the virtual events which have taken up much of her schedule since the pandemic hit.

Captain Essenhigh said: ‘It’s always a great privilege to host the Queen and to have her as both our sovereign and our lady sponsor come and wish us well as we set off on a seven-month deployment is something incredibly special.’ 

Engineering Technician Marine Engineering (ETME) Billie Matthews, 22, from County Durham, who was one of those who met the Queen, said: ‘It was brilliant, she was very chatty, very smily.’

Able seaman Chelsea Paterson, 24, from Chirnside, Scotland, said: ‘It was incredible, an honour to see her, let alone speak to her, the highlight of my career.’

Commodore Steve Moorhouse, commander UK CSG, said the Queen was looking forward to some peace and quiet, as the F35B jets based near her home in Sandringham would be away on the deployment for seven months.

He said: ‘It wasn’t lost on her they are from Marham, just down the road from Sandringham, so she hears them regularly, so she was just relieved to see them go to sea and get a little peace over her.’

He added: ‘It was an absolute privilege to host her majesty on her flagship, she was really fascinated and interested in where we were going and was particularly struck not just by where the carrier was going but where the frigates and destroyers are going and the variety of the trip.’

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, who also visited the ship, said: ‘This deployment shows that we are strong on our own, but even stronger with our allies. I want to join the nation in wishing the crews across the Carrier Strike Group every success as they depart on this truly historic endeavour.’

The MoD has announced that the CSG’s F35B Lightning fast jets operated by the renowned ‘Dambusters’ squadron, or 617 Squadron, will join Operation Shader targeting the remnants of so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The F35B jets are multi-role combat aircraft equipped with advanced sensors, mission systems and stealth technology – enabling them to carry out intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance tasks.

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.

Accompanying HMS Queen Elizabeth will be a surface fleet made up of Type 45 destroyers HMS Defender and HMS Diamond, Type 23 anti-submarine frigates HMS Kent and HMS Richmond, and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary’s RFA Fort Victoria and RFA Tidespring, as well as the US destroyer USS The Sullivans and Dutch frigate HNLMS Evertsen.

The Royal Navy Astute-class submarine will also deploy, armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles.

The carrier had not been expected to return to Portsmouth after taking part in a major exercise off Scotland and the CSG had been expected to gather in the Solent prior to departure.

But heavy winds led to the unscheduled stop in the naval base with most of the other ships waiting at Devonport to regroup before sailing for the Mediterranean.  

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, 38, from Gosport, Hampshire.  

He said: ‘It was an incredible honour for me and my family.’ 

He said that the Queen remembered sailing past his previous ship, HMS Illustrious, in the royal yacht in Istanbul in 2008, at the moment the carrier was at risk of losing a Merlin helicopter overboard.

The father-of-two said: ‘She asked if I had anything to do with it and I answered that I didn’t, and if I had I wouldn’t be getting my medal.’ 

Engineering Technician Marine Engineering (ETME) Morgan Brookes and his father, Chief Petty Officer Paul Brookes, both work in the same department ensuring the smooth running of the £3billion warship.

The father and son, from Gosport, Hampshire, both said they were thrilled to meet the Queen as she visited the carrier at Portsmouth Naval Base.

Morgan, 20, who has been in the navy for two years, said: ‘It was quite incredible, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, she is just an amazing woman.’

Paul, originally from West Bromwich, and who has been in the navy for 23 years, said: ‘She said how lovely it was that we were working together and she had quite a cheeky smile as she asked us about it.’ 

Captain Essenhigh said: ‘It’s always a great privilege to host the Queen and to have her as both our sovereign and our lady sponsor come and wish us well as we set off on a seven-month deployment is something incredibly special.’  

The deployment of the fleet of ships, named the Carrier Strike Group (CSG) 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. 

The carrier had not been expected to return to Portsmouth after taking part in a major exercise off the coast of Scotland while the CSG had been expected to gather in the Solent prior to departure.

But heavy winds led to the unscheduled stop in the naval base in Portsmouth with most of the other ships waiting at Devonport to regroup before sailing for the Mediterranean. 

Accompanying HMS Queen Elizabeth will be a surface fleet made up of Type 45 destroyers HMS Defender and HMS Diamond, Type 23 anti-submarine frigates HMS Kent and HMS Richmond, and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary’s RFA Fort Victoria and RFA Tidespring. 

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.