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On July 9, 1982, a barefoot, unshaven Michael Fagan, wearing only a sweatshirt and jeans, shimmied up a Buckingham Palace drainpipe and onto a flat roof that was only a few feet away from the palace’s main building.

He then climbed through an unlocked window and into the palace’s historic halls, undetected by cameras or security, slipped by staff going about their daily business, and into Queen Elizabeth II’s chambers.

He admitted that he intended to slash his wrists in front of her with a shard of an ashtray that he’d smashed in the palace, but changed his mind.

In an interview with The Independent, Fagan described the incident as follows:

“I was scareder than I’d ever been in my life,” he says, widening his eyes theatrically as he recalls the moment he pulled back the curtains to see the Queen staring up at him.

“Then she speaks and it’s like the finest glass you can imagine breaking: ‘Wawrt are you doing here?!'”

He goes on to describe what happened in the Queen’s bedroom:

“It was a double bed but a single room, definitely – she was sleeping in there on her own,” he giggles.

“Her nightie was one of those Liberty prints and it was down to her knees.”

In the depiction of this event in the recently aired season four of The Crown, Fagan breaks in to have a chat with HRH Liz. He says that it didn’t happen.

“Nah! She went past me and ran out of the room; her little bare feet running across the floor.”

He was also barefoot but says he didn’t start out that way.

“I got my sandals returned to me two years later by a security guard.”

“‘These are Michael’s sandal, we found them on the roof”, they said”.

The Queen had pushed the emergency night button as soon as she spotted Fagan, but her guard had gone off duty at 6AM. She managed to summon help from an unarmed footman who stood watch until the police came.

Fagan recalls, with increasing licence: “The footman came and said, ‘Cor, fucking hell mate, you look like you need a drink’. His name was [Paul] Whybrew, which is a funny name for someone offering you a drink, innit? He took me to the Queen’s pantry, across the landing, where I presume she cooks her baked beans and toast and whatever – and takes a bottle of Famous Grouse from the shelf and pours me a glass of whisky.”

He admits that this was not the first time that he’d broken into the palace. The time prior, he was desperate to use the loo.

“I found rooms saying ‘Diana’s room’, ‘Charles’s room’; they all had names on them. But I couldn’t find a door which said ‘WC’. All I found were some bins with ‘corgi food’ written on them. I was breaking my neck to go to the toilet. What do I do? Pee on the carpet? So I had to pee on the corgi food.”

He says he has no regrets, but wouldn’t chance it again, because the palace has upped its security.

All these years later, however, he still can’t explain why he did it, but reckons it had something to do with the magic mushrooms he had put in his soup five months earlier.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

In The Crown, he is depicted as a symbol for the average citizen’s frustration with the Thatcher years and the mass unemployment that ravaged England while she was Prime Minister.

He also exists to remind the Queen that she is out of touch with the common folk:

Fagan was sentenced to six months in a psychiatric hospital after he was caught.

He is now 72, lives in London, and says he has “great respect” for the Queen.

[source:independent]