The queen’s unexpected visitor

Michael Fagan has seen Queen Elizabeth II in her nightie, said Emily Dugan in the London Independent. In 1982, the 32-year-old petty criminal and drug user scaled the walls of Buckingham Palace and ended up in the British monarch’s bedroom. Even now, he’s not sure why he did it but suspects he was still affected by some magic mushrooms he’d taken months earlier. Fagan prowled around the palace that night—“It was like Goldilocks and the three bears,” he says—before escaping through a garden door. A few weeks later, he decided to do it again. “I was scareder than I’d ever been,” he says, recalling the moment when he pulled back the curtains on Her Majesty’s bed and saw 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 didn’t have time to answer the question. “She went past me and ran out of the room; her little bare feet running across the floor.” Until the police arrived, he was guarded by an unarmed footman, who gave him a glass of whiskey. “He said, ‘Cor, f---ing hell, mate, you look like you need a drink.’ His name was Whybrew, which is a funny name for someone offering you a drink, innit?”