The Queen has never said exactly what conspired between Fagan and herself for the ten minutes it took for her maid to arrive and alert authorities. 'The Crown' Season 4 trailer darkly foreshadows the 'fairy tale' of Princess Diana Most of the report from that night goes on to describe the palace’s faulty security systems and says little else about Fagan’s motivations. That police report also includes a disturbing detail that did not make it into The Crown: after his capture, Fagan told authorities that seeing the broken glass ashtray gave him the idea to cut his wrists in front of the queen, though “he had not entered the palace with this intention.” Fagan did not accomplish or even attempt this, but he did leave a bloodstain on the queen’s sheets from a cut on his thumb. The initial police report from Scotland Yard detailing the incident mentions previous suspected break-ins at the palace but does not connect Fagan to any of those incursions. The Crown shows that the July incursion was Fagan’s second visit, but the only source for that first break-in (the one where he wanders the halls of the palace, sits on the Queen’s throne, and drinks a bottle of wine) is Fagan himself, who revealed his previous crime in a bizarre interview with The Independent in 2012. It is fact that Michael Fagan, then 31 years old, broke into Buckingham Palace on July 9th, 1982 and was discovered in the Queen’s bedroom.
As is common with history, however, the spaces between those facts are the most interesting and least knowable parts. The real story behind Michael Fagan is difficult to pin down, as only the coldest facts about Fagan’s actions remain in the public record - when and how he broke into the palace, how long he was there, and what happened to him afterward. It presents Fagan as a bizarre antihero whose actions remind the Queen of how little she has in common with “ordinary” people and encourages her to temporarily reassess her role as a figurehead. The Crown uses Michael Fagan as a symbol of a British everyman’s frustration with the government under Margaret Thatcher and further weaves the story of his break-in into the season’s larger themes of Queen Elizabeth II’s enforced distance from her family and subjects. Marriages, assassinations, wars, and the Thatcher years are crammed into just ten episodes, but the midpoint of the season takes a moment to reflect on one of the stranger incidents of the era - Michael Fagan's 1982 break-in to the Queen's bedroom. Whybrew wrestled with him and pushed him outside where a maid who saw them called the attention of a policeman.Season 4 of The Crown takes place over most of the 1980s, one of the royal's family's more eventful decades. The monarch’s long-time aide, Paul Whybrew, eventually arrived and began talking to Fagan to calm him down. She phoned the switchboard, but the operator thought it was a prank and couldn’t have been the Queen herself.įagan broke a glass tray and threatened to cut his wrists with it as he sat on the queen’s bed. The monarch was said to have pushed the panic button by her bed, but got no response while the 31-year-old schizophrenic began talking about his family problems. On July 9, 1982, an unemployed man, Fagan, jumped the palace walls and got into the Queen’s bedroom. It is not the first time Buckingham Palace’s security has been breached.
It added that no weapon was found on the man and that the matter is not being treated terrorism-related.
Scotland Yard say the man was arrested on suspicion of trespass and was held at about at 2.00pm by officers from the Met’s Royalty and Specialist Protection Command. It is understood that the queen was the only senior member of the royal family sleeping at the palace because of ongoing refurbishment work. “What about heat censors and CCTV? The Queen’s safety should be paramount.”