By Arguably the most interesting moments during the new season of The Crown are when scenes from outside the palace walls throw the the blasé grandeur of royal life into sharp relief. Halfway through the fourth season of Netflix's historical drama, in an episode titled 'Fagan', we follow the day of someone suffering under the economic policies that Margaret Thatcher is corralling the country with. We see Michael Fagan in the queue for the dole, left alone with empty bunkbeds in his council flat, harassing the woman who left him and gazing at Buckingham Palace from the windows of a bus.
The real Michael Fagan was a London-born decorator who broke into the palace for the first time in June 1982. After jumping the gates and finding an open window he wandered past doors labelled for members of the royal family in search of a toilet, eventually urinating on a bin of corgi food after failing to find one. While his toilet trip didn't make it into Netflix's dramatisation, Fagan did in fact drink a cheap bottle of white wine he found lying around as he does in The Crown.
The following month he broke into the palace again, triggering the alarms twice but failing to be apprehended because the police assumed it was a mistake. Following portraits on the wall he made his away around the palace, breaking an ashtray in one room which he carried a shard of into the Queen's bedroom which he entered at around 7am.
According to the Scotland Yard report, as reported by the New York Times, Fagan told police that he planned to harm himself in the Queen's presence, which The Crown did not acknowledge in their version of events.
The events within the bedroom also differ considerably from reality, with Fagan saying that The Crown writer Peter Morgan "used a lot of artistic licence" in an interview with The Telegraph. Fagan admits that he "pulled back the curtain and she said, 'What are you doing here?'", but their conversation about Thatcher and the direction of the country never happened. Instead the Queen said "I’ll be back in a minute", and left the room, with her footman offering him a drink to buy them some time before the police came and arrested him.
In The Crown, Fagan is a symbol of the soaring unemployment and unrest which ordinary people are experiencing as Thatcher dismantles society and pushes her agenda of individual responsibility. In reality, Michael Fagan was never finally heard by the establishment who were ignoring him. There was no touching handshake with the Queen, nor her saying she would "bear in mind" what he said.
Earlier in the same episode we see Princess Margaret encouraged to meet members of the public because it is "good for you to meet someone normal – to tell you how it is", and this foreshadows the Queen having an honest conversation with a real person who is not bowing and scraping. The fictional version of Fagan is also useful fuel to the fire of the Queen and Thatcher butting up against each other, which finally leads to them coming to a head over Apartheid South Africa.
As with much of its fourth season, The Crown adds bombastic emotional details into history, and yet the 'Fagan' episode is one not where we imagine the cold cruelness of the monarchy, but hope that an interaction with an ordinary person could be a reminder of the real world beyond the towering gates.
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