FROM THE ARCHIVES
An interview with the man who sat on the Queen’s bed, twice!
Michael Fagan, a man forever destined to be a Trivial Pursuit answer, has never come to terms with the spotlight that has glared down on him since he broke into Buckingham Palace and woke up the Queen. One minute he was a face in the crowds. Next, his name was on everyone’s lips as he made headlines around the world.
Since that fateful day in
1982, the lines on his face have deepened, his circumstances have changed, but it’s clear he still hates the limelight.
“It’s a nightmare,” moans Michael. “It seems there is nowhere I can go without some joker asking me if I’ve heard from the Queen.”
The story began at 11.15
on the night of June 7, 1982, when the slightly-built man scaled the Buckingham Palace railings, causing the biggest security scandal the nation had ever known.
Ignoring “fail-safe” security devices, he climbed a 15m drainpipe, climbed in through an open bedroom window, and terrified a housemaid who had earlier been to a séance.
As she raised the alarm, he slipped into the corridor to look at some paintings lining the walls. In a store room, he found a bottle of wine, which he opened with a pair of scissors.
Michael hadn’t come to rob. He had come to see the Queen. She would listen to his woes, he thought, and miraculously come up with some answers.
“I was depressed,” he recounts now. “I had a lot of debts, I was out of work and my wife had left me and taken the kids. I had so many things on my mind.”
After taking a swig of the palace wine and wiping his mouth, he cautiously peered round the door, but hurriedly drew back when he saw a policeman with a dog.
“I didn’t want to get bitten,” says Michael, “so when the coast was clear
I went downstairs, slipped out and made my way home. I reckoned I would see the Queen some other time.”
In the early hours of July 9, 1982, Michael Fagan carried out his second and more audacious break-in at the royal palace.
“This time I’d made up my mind. I had to see the Queen,” he says. “I had to tell her my problems. Maybe, I thought, she could help me get back my kids.
“I climbed over the railings – there was no-one about – and got in through an open window on the ground floor. But when I couldn’t get out through the inside door, I climbed back out of the window and up a drainpipe onto a flat roof. It was easy. Nothing to it at all.”
From there he slipped in through an open window and eventually found himself alone in the throne room.
Michael, who was wearing a T-shirt and jeans at the time, remembers how he took off his shoes and socks and wiped his hands on the curtains because they were covered in pigeon repellent from the drainpipe.
“I remember sitting down on the thrones, trying each one for size,” he says.
Then, after accidentally opening a secret door leading to the Queen’s private apartments, he strolled down a corridor, fully expecting to be seized by the guards. But nothing happened. There was no security.
Minutes later, he was in the royal bedchamber, staring down at the Queen lying in bed.
According to official reports, the Queen awoke to find Michael standing barefoot, clutching a broken ashtray and nursing a cut thumb.
“She was very much in control,” he recalls now.
“She didn’t panic. She just sat up, calm as you like, pressed an alarm bell and kept telling me to get out… get out.”
But Michael might not have gone to all that trouble for nothing. According to the official report, the Queen then listened patiently as the intruder poured out his troubles.
Michael now says she did no such thing. “After asking me what I was doing, she got out of bed pretty fast and left the room.”
For six minutes, as Michael sat slumped on the royal bed, no-one heeded the Queen’s calls for assistance. Then a maid surfaced and somehow the intruder was ushered into a pantry where Paul Whybrow, the Queen’s footman, arrived, having just taken the corgis for a walk.
At the suggestion of the Queen, he offered Michael a glass of whisky, followed by a cigarette.
“All the time, I could hear the Queen bawling down the phone,” Michael recalls, “demanding to know why the police hadn’t arrived.”
Events moved fast after that. He was fingerprinted, remanded in custody, charged with the first break-in, and committed indefinitely to a psychiatric hospital to rub shoulders with psychopaths and killers.
“That had to be the worst time of my life,” he tells. “They were way out of line sending me there. After all, I never meant to harm the Queen. In fact, I did her and the country a bloody big favour by pointing out how easy it was to break in – not once but twice!”
As the months went by, a groundswell of unease about the sentence forced a review. His parents started a petition. A Labour MP took up the case and on January 19, 1983, Michael was freed and returned to his family.
Christine Fagan was there to meet her husband, but there was no reconciliation and they eventually divorced. He was awarded custody of the children.
Looking back, he says, “All right, 10 years ago I flipped out and did something
I’ll regret for the rest of my life. Crazy? Of course it was crazy. I mean, who in their right mind would shimmy up a drainpipe, break into Buckingham Palace and talk to the Queen? But I paid the price.
“I was sent away from my kids, and that hurt more than anyone will ever know. But it also gave me time to think – at least, when I wasn’t dizzy from the knockout jabs they kept giving me. For the first time
I was able to take an objective view of my problems.”
In that sense, Michael has more than achieved his goal. He passionately loves the youngsters and is easily wounded if they become the butt of snide royal jokes.
“Thankfully, they don’t offend that easily,” he says. “In any case, there are a lot more important things to worry about. Right now, all I’m concerned with is their education, and seeing they get decent jobs when they leave school.
“Like me, they read a lot and know what’s going on around them. And you know what?” He gives a typical Michael grin. “I’ve always brought them up to respect the Queen and the royal family.”