11. Buckingham Palace’s Security Was a Joke for a Long Time
To make matters worse for Buckingham’s security, it was apparently the second time that Michael Fagan had simply walked into the palace, and 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, and 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. He then wandered around for almost three hours without anybody stopping 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, Fagan tripped two intruder alerts, but palace security turned them off because they thought it was just a faulty alarm system acting up. 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 before he was eventually released in early 1983.
