The Queen screenwriter says Tony Blair swiped fictional dialogue from the film for his memoir
As reported by The Daily Telegraph: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has a new memoir out, A Journey: My Political Life. But screenwriter Peter Morgan—an Oscar nominee for his script for The Queen, the 2006 biopic about Queen Elizabeth II—has made a strange allegation about Blair's book. According to Morgan, a line attributed to Queen Elizabeth in A Journey was never spoken by her in real life; rather, Blair swiped it from his movie.
In The Queen, Elizabeth (played by Helen Mirren) privately tells the freshly elected Tony Blair (played by Michael Sheen), "You are my 10th prime minister, Mr. Blair. My first was Winston Churchill." Morgan says he completely and utterly fabricated that line when writing his script. And yet, in Blair's memoir, he writes that Elizabeth once told him, "You are my 10th prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born."
Blair maintains he's never seen The Queen, but Morgan counters, "There are three possibilities. 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 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."