Tony Blair stole lines for memoir?

Screenwriter Peter Morgan accuses former British Prime Minister of plagiarising dialogues from his Oscar-winning film The Queen

Screenwriter Peter Morgan accuses former British Prime Minister of plagiarising dialogues from his Oscar-winning film The Queen

Writing a 700-page memoir can be a lot of work good thing for Tony Blair he apparently had help.

The screenwriter of the Oscar-winning movie The Queen has accused the former British prime minister of plagiarising his dialogue.

Peter Morgan yesterday cited remarkable similarities between how he imagined a 1997 meeting between Blair and Queen Elizabeth and the account of the actual sit-down in Blair's book, A Journey: My Political Life.

Morgan's words

In Morgan's script, the monarch, played by Helen Mirren, who won an Oscar for the role, tells Blair, "You are my 10th prime minister, Mr Blair. My first was Winston Churchill."

Blair wrote that Queen Elizabeth told him, "You are my 10th prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born."

Morgan said he was dumbfounded when he read the book. "I wish I could pretend that I had inside knowledge," he said. "But I made up those lines."

Is it possible...

Morgan, who also penned the scripts for Frost/Nixon and The Last King of Scotland, suggested three possibilities for the similarity.

"The first is, I guessed absolutely perfectly, which is highly unlikely. 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 [got] confused," added Morgan.

Blair's publishers didn't respond to an e-mail for comment but the politician has previously claimed he never saw the 2006 movie.

His book, released last week, is currently No 13 on Amazon's bestseller list.

'Snooty' Queen
Tony Blair branded the Queen snooty in his autobiography. He described her as stuck-up and divulged details of their private conversations, including how she handled Princess Di's death. One senior courtier said the royals had expressed their "profound sense of disappointment" over the book.