Buckingham Palace Security’s Dismal Failures to Protect the Monarch
Subsequent investigation revealed that the security lapse was not a one-off. Apparently, it was the second time that Michael Fagan had simply walked into Buckingham Palace, and freely wandered all over the place. A few weeks earlier, he had shimmied up a drainpipe and startled a maid, who called security. By the time they arrived, Fagan was nowhere to be seen. The guards dismissed the maid’s report of an intruder as a figment of her imagination. In the meantime, Fagan entered the palace through an unlocked window, and ambled about for three hours. Nobody stopped him, as he snacked on cheese and crackers.
Fagan checked out the royal portraits, sat on the throne for a bit, drank half a bottle of wine that he had found, then eventually got bored and left. As he roamed the palace, he tripped two intruder alerts. Rather than respond, palace security turned them off because they thought it was just a faulty alarm system. At the time, Fagan’s intrusions into the palace and the queen’s bedroom were civil offenses rather than criminal ones. So he was only charged with theft of the wine that he drank on his earlier visit. That charge was eventually dismissed when he was committed for psychiatric evaluation. He was institutionalized for three months, and released in early 1983.
