The Gorgeous Myth of Queen Elizabeth and Michael Fagan, the Palace Intruder
On July 9, 1982, at correct spherical 7 a.m., Michael Fagan shimmied up a Buckingham Palace drainpipe your complete manner to a flat roof that used to be easiest a couple of feet far off from the palace’s important constructing. He used to be barefoot, unshaven, and carrying easiest a sweatshirt and denims. He climbed via an unlocked window and into the palace’s historical halls, undetected by cameras or security. Then he slipped into the chambers of Queen Elizabeth II.
With regards to 40 years later, the worst security breach in Buckingham Palace historical previous is revisited in season four, episode five, of The Crown, “Fagan.” As every other of revealing it from the queen’s standpoint, creator Peter Morgan approaches it from the downtrodden eyes of Fagan. An unemployed decorator struggling with psychological sickness, he’s estranged from his wife, his teenagers, and most of all, Thatcherism. He breaks into the queen’s bedroom on record of he needs her to know how folk adore him had been left in the serve of by the conservative, deregulated hiss. “She’s destroying the country,” he says of Thatcher. “The apt to work, the apt to be ill, the apt to be mature, the apt to be outmoded, to be human—gone.”
The bones of the memoir line are right. An unemployed Fagan did break into Buckingham Palace, no longer once however twice. And the 2d time, he did plug into the queen’s bedroom for 10 uninterrupted minutes until she used to be ready to procure serve.
But The Crown did resolve vital creative license. In response to, neatly, Fagan himself: In a current interview with The Telegraph, he recounted that they didn’t advise for terribly lengthy the least bit. “‘What are you doing right here?’” Fagan says the monarch asked when he pulled serve her curtains. Furthermore, Scotland Yard’s incident document on the time said that, after two telephone calls to the police, “Her Majesty attracted the honor of the maid, and together they ushered Fagan into a shut by pantry on the pretext of supplying him with a cigarette.”
Stories published straight away after the incident in 1982 fleshed out their conversation subject issues a little bit extra: The Unusual York Cases, as an instance, wrote that Fagan and the queen talked about Prince Charles. (This is clever: Charles and Diana had correct welcomed their first child, Prince William, weeks before.) A rant towards conservatism and Thatcher, nonetheless? No longer mentioned by any news outlet and even by Fagan himself.
One component of The Crown’s depiction that’s right? Fagan’s wine theft. At some stage in his first break in—where he also purchased in by method of drainpipe—he stumbled on himself in Buckingham Palace’s Room 108. It used to be being mature to store items the public despatched for the Prince and Princess of Wales’s little one. He stumbled on a bottle of Australian wine in the cupboard and poured himself a drink. “I used to be waiting to be captured,” he said at some point of his trial for theft of the bottle of wine. (He used to be acquitted.) “I drank it on record of I used to be watching for somebody to shut.” And, the 2d time spherical, somebody absolutely did.