See a celebrity, and you see their entourage. Publicists. Agents. Hair and make-up. Security. You would think that the ultimate example of this would be the Queen, and that she would always be surrounded by people who kept her safe. But the latest season of The Crown on Netflix reminds those who don’t know their history that this isn’t necessarily the case, and that she was once awoken in her own bedroom by an intruder.
Michael Fagan, a painter and decorator, was the Buckingham Palace intruder in question. Amazingly, he had broken in once before earlier in the year but had fled after walking around and sitting on the throne. But he returned to make mischief on that fateful visit on July 9th, 1982, climbing a drainpipe and, later, finding the monarch in her bedroom.
‘I walk past her bed and it looks too small to be the Queen. So I go over and draw the curtain back, just to make sure, and suddenly she sat up’, he told the Mirror. ‘She sat up and said to him: “What are you doing here?”’
He has engaged in occasional interviews ever since. Back in 2012, Michael told The Independent that he had ‘great respect’ for the Queen, and recalled the specifics of her room. ‘It was a double bed but a single room, definitely – she was sleeping in there on her own’, he said. ‘Her nightie was one of those Liberty prints and it was down to her knees.’
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He does, however, deny the claims that the Queen maintained a length conversation with him, ostensibly to distract him while she waited for security. ‘Nah!’, he said. ‘She went past me and ran out of the room; her little bare feet running across the floor.’
Remarkably, he avoided prosecuting. Back then, the invasion was classed as a civil wrong , not a criminal offence. Still, best not try that yourselves: the law has, of course, been changed these days.
The Crown, Season 4 is available on Netflix