The most unbelievable thing about Michael Fagan’s 1982 Buckingham Palace break-in, which climaxed with Fagan’s infamous bedroom meeting with Queen Elizabeth, is that the trespassing was actually the second time Fagan managed to breach the palace that summer.
Fagan testified that he had broken into Buckingham Palace about a month before the July incident, roaming the 775-room palace on a sort of self-guided tour. He quietly crept past what he believed to be Princess Anne’s bedroom—showing surprising reverence for a trespasser. (“I decided not to disturb [her],” he later explained.) He walked through a room containing the public’s gifts for Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s firstborn child. He perused the palace art. He sat in various thrones, later likening the experience to his own royal version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. (“I tried one throne and was like, This one’s too soft,” he recalled. “There was one right next to it, so I tried another.”) And he shuffled through piles of paperwork.
Ultimately, the unemployed decorator felt so comfortable in the queen’s home that he helped himself to half a bottle of wine and sat down, waiting for authorities to find him.
“I walked straight in. I was surprised I wasn’t captured straight away,” Fagan later said, as astonished by Buckingham Palace’s humiliating security breach as anyone. He sounded strangely protective of the queen, considering he had broken into her home: “I could have been a rapist or something.”
Fagan later told a court that he grew so bored waiting for security during that first break-in that he ultimately decided to leave: “I thought, Sod it, and I went out and went home.”
A month later, Fagan felt confident he could regain entry. “I knew I could break the security system because it was so weak,” he said.
Ahead, even more astonishing details about Fagan’s palace intrusions—which Peter Morgan recreated for a season-four episode of The Crown called “Fagan.”
Fagan was spotted by palace staffers on both occasions—but communication failures were so catastrophic that Fagan was not caught until his second visit, when the queen finally flagged down a maid to help her.
During his inaugural break-in, Fagan hopped a fence and climbed up a drainpipe to enter the palace through a third-floor window. Even though a royal housemaid witnessed Fagan—wearing a sweatshirt, jeans, and no shoes—break into the palace, the security team’s reaction time was so slow that Fagan was able to wander the halls of the queen’s home undeterred.
During the second visit, after Fagan gained entry through an unlocked window, a palace staff member spotted the trespasser. But according to the Scotland Yard report published by the New York Times, Fagan’s “behavior was not sufficiently suspicious to cause her to raise the alarm.”
Scotland Yard later determined that Fagan had also been seen “by a police officer who passed a message via another police officer to the control room inside the palace”—but the response was communicated too inefficiently to stop Fagan. Fagan had also set off an alarm in the stamp room that was ignored.
When the queen discovered Fagan in her bedchamber, during Fagan’s second break-in, she buzzed and phoned for help multiple times—but those SOS messages went, incredibly, unheeded.
Fagan was able to enter the queen’s bedroom undetected at about 7:15 a.m on July 9 because the police sergeant tasked with safeguarding the queen’s corridor had gone off duty at about 6 a.m., the queen’s footman was outside exercising the monarch’s dogs, and the queen’s maid was cleaning another room behind closed doors.
Because the queen’s immediate staff members were either off duty or out of earshot, no one heard her alarms.
The queen then called the palace’s telephonist to tell them to send police to her bedroom. When police still had not arrived six minutes later—a stunning delay, considering the request had come from Her Majesty—the queen made another phone call in attempt to summon authorities to her room.
Ultimately, the queen flagged down a maid to help her steer Fagan “into a nearby pantry on the pretext of supplying him with a cigarette.”
Shortly after, the queen’s footman, who had been preoccupied with the dogs, returned and was able to keep Fagan in the pantry until police arrived.