Fiction

Did Blair Plagiarize Scene in Book?

The Queen screenwriter says P.M. copied his movie.

The writer of the Oscar-winning film The Queen says Tony Blair stole a scene from his movie and used it to describe an encounter with the real Queen in his new memoir, A Journey. Blair says the Queen told him upon his election in 1997, "You are my 10th prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born." These lines appear almost exactly in Peter Morgan's film, which he says he made up entirely. "There are three possibilities. The first is I guessed absolutely perfectly, which is highly unlikely," Morgan told The Daily Telegraph, "the second is Blair decided to endorse what I imagined as the official line; and the third is that he had one gin and tonic too many and confused the scene in the film with what had actually happened, and this I find amusing because he always insisted he had never even seen it." A rep for Blair says he's never seen the flick and the accusation is just a PR stunt by Morgan.