How I ticked off the intruder in my bedroom – by the Queen
LIKE her mother, the Queen is socially adept, as demonstrated back in 1982 when an intruder named Michael Fagan managed to climb the 14ft wall around Buckingham Palace and entered the building through an open window before making his way to her bedroom.
It was 6am and the unarmed footman who stood guard outside her door had gone to walk the corgis, leaving Fagan free to walk in.
‘That must have been very scary for you,’ I said, when she told me about this over predinner drinks at Balmoral one night.
‘Oh no,’ she replied with a smile. ‘ I wasn’t scared in the slightest.
‘When I woke, I just saw him there at the end of my bed and for a split second I thought it was a member of staff.
‘A second later, I realised it was somebody from the outside and thought: “Oh well, I’ll just have to talk to him.” ’
What did slightly alarm her was the blood dripping from a nasty gash on his hand.
Along the way he had picked up an ashtray and smashed it in half, perhaps planning to harm the Queen or commit suicide in her presence.
Whatever he had planned, he clearly had second thoughts, deciding it wasn’t ‘a nice thing to do’ once she had engaged him in conversation.
‘I just asked him what he was doing in my bedroom,’ she told me. ‘He said he had come to chat and so we chatted. I asked him his name and about his life and his family.
‘To be honest, I didn’t really
have much time to be alarmed. Eventually I told him: “Look, you really shouldn’t be here.” ‘He replied: “Yes, I know.” ’ There then followed a farcical situation in which she picked up the phone and asked the Palace switchboard to contact the police. Though the message was passed on, the police didn’t respond. So the polite conversation continued. ‘ He asked me about my children and I said I had four and gave their names. Then we chatted about his children.’
She then tried to summon a chambermaid by pressing a button. Again, no one came.
‘He asked for a cigarette, but I said I didn’t smoke,’ she told me. Eventually a maid did enter the Queen’s bedchamber and seeing Fagan, rushed out in horror to fetch a footman, who seized him.
All the time, as the Queen told me, they ‘ just carried on talking’, her life conceivably saved by conversational skills honed during the countless social occasions of her reign.