Tony Blair, Plagiarist?

Screenwriter suspects he had 'one too many' drinks, copied film dialogue
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 9, 2010 8:27 AM CDT
Tony Blair, Plagiarist?
A man looks at a shelf with Tony Blair's books in London as a notice hangs on a wall informing the cancellation of the book signing by Blair of his book 'A Journey', Wednesday, Sept. 8, 2010.   (AP Photo/Sang Tan)

Tony Blair: Former prime minister, published memoirist ... and plagiarist? That's what screenwriter Peter Morgan suspects. Blair's version of his 1997 meeting with the Queen in A Journey reads: "You are my 10th prime minister. The first was Winston." If that sounds familiar, it's probably because you saw The Queen, written by Peter Morgan. Morgan's version: "You are my 10th prime minister, Mr. Blair. My first was Winston Churchill."

"There are three possibilities," Morgan (who insists he had no "inside knowledge" of the conversation) tells the Telegraph. "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." (Click here for another group that had a less than pleasant reaction to Blair's book.)

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