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shaking like leaves and returned calmly to bed to have her tea. On the bed was a large
fragment of a broken glass ashtray and blood – Fagan later said he had intended to
slash his wrists in front of the Queen.
Elizabeth gave strict instructions that the incident was not to be mentioned, but the
police report was leaked to the newspapers the next day, Saturday, and after waiting
for confirmation the press broke the story on Monday. The report to the Home Secretary
revealed that Palace security, as Fagan claimed to have told Elizabeth, was indeed
‘diabolical’. This was not the first time he had been in the Palace; on the previous
occasion he had taken a bottle of wine. This time he had been spotted on the railings
near the Ambassador’s Entrance on the south front of the Palace, and again climbing
through the Master of the Household’s office window which had been opened by a
housemaid. He was seen in the corridor outside by a housemaid, who assumed he must
be a workman, and from then on he had been able to traverse the corridors halfway
round the Palace to the Queen’s bedroom on the north front. Within two weeks another
security scandal broke when it was announced that Commander Michael Trestrail, the
Queen’s police officer, who had served her for years and of whom she was very fond,
had confessed to having a homosexual relationship over a number of years with a male
prostitute and had resigned from the Metropolitan Police. Elizabeth, who was in
hospital after having had a wisdom tooth out, was very upset, not so much at the
security angle but at the loss of Trestrail. Within that week the IRA blew up a squadron
of the Household Cavalry in Hyde Park on its way to the changing of the guard at
Buckingham Palace and a military band in Regent’s Park. Elizabeth’s coolness when
faced with Fagan recalled her courage just over a year earlier, on 13 June 1981, when a
young man had stepped out into the road as she rode down the Mall for the Trooping
the Colour ceremony and fired six shots at her, which luckily turned out to be blanks
(although she was not to know that at the time). Elizabeth merely ducked, patted her
horse, Burmese, and rode on. The royal family has a fatalistic attitude towards the
possibility of assassination and reacts accordingly, as did Anne during the Mall kidnap
attempt (the most serious of the three incidents) and Charles in Australia in 1995.
While the Trestrail affair inspired the press to one of its periodic field days about the
number of homosexuals in royal service, the Fagan episode also gave rise to speculation
about the state of Elizabeth’s marriage and the royal couple’s sleeping arrangements.
Elizabeth is held to have said soon afterwards that her one concern while talking to
Fagan was that Philip might burst into the room and all hell break loose. 5 This cannot
be true as she knew that by the time Fagan was sitting on her bed, Philip had left the
Palace at 6 a.m. for a distant official engagement, and, in order not to wake her up, had
spent the night in the dressing-room of his apartment. Had he not had that engagement
he would have been in Elizabeth’s bed – they always sleep together when under the
same roof – and Fagan might have had rather a different reception.
The Falklands war, the first major military conflict of Elizabeth’s reign, had ended
with the surrender of the Argentine forces on 14 June 1982. When Andrew returned
from the Falklands that summer, he was already, unknown to his mother, in love with