There is no end to Tony Blair's woes! After enraging the Queen with his tell-all memoir, now a screenwriter has accused Blair of plagiarism.
Screenwriter Peter Morgan has accused the former British Prime Minister of directly lifting a dialogue from his Oscar winning film The Queen.
Morgan cited a stark similarity between his reel life rendition of a meeting between the Queen and Blair and the account of
the actual sit-down in Blair's 700 page memoir, A Journey: My Political Life.
In the film, Helen Mirren, who won an Oscar for essaying the role of monarch, tells Blair, "You are my 10th prime minister, Mr Blair. My first was Winston Churchill."
Interestingly, Blair wrote in his book, "You are my 10th prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born."
Morgan said that he was surprised when he read the exact words in Blair's book. Refuting that he had inside knowledge, he said, "I wish I could pretend that I had inside knowledge," he said. "But I made up those lines."
{{/usCountry}}Morgan said that he was surprised when he read the exact words in Blair's book. Refuting that he had inside knowledge, he said, "I wish I could pretend that I had inside knowledge," he said. "But I made up those lines."
{{/usCountry}}Incidentally, he has 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.
His book is currently No 13 on Amazon's bestseller list.