Blair accused of stealing lines from 'The Queen' to put in his memoirs (and now film's writer admits he made them up)

Tony Blair has been accused of stealing lines from the 2006 film 'The Queen' for his new memoirs.

Peter Morgan, the screenwriter of the hugely successful British film starring Helen Mirren and Michael Sheen, said a particularly poignant moment described in Mr Blair's book was actually totally made up for the movie.



Mr Blair claims Queen Elizabeth II told him after Labour's landslide victory in 1997: 'You are my 10th Prime Minister. The first was Winston [Churchill]. That was before you were born'.

The Queen

The passage in 'A Journey: My Political Life' is said to have angered the Monarch as private encounters with the Royal Family are not usually disclosed to the general public.

Mr Morgan, however, has now claimed the exchange may not have actually taken place at all.

In the 2006 film, directed by Stephen Frears, Helen Mirren, playing the Queen, tells Michael Sheen, playing Mr Blair: 'You are my 10th Prime Minister, Mr. Blair. My first was Winston Churchill.'

Claiming he made the entire conversation up, Mr Morgan said he was surprised to see the quote in Mr Blair's book.

He told the Daily Telegraph: 'I wish I could pretend that I had inside knowledge, but I made up those lines.

Film script: Mr Blair claims to have never seen The Queen, a scene of which is show here, but the quote in his book is remarkably similar to one in the film

Cancelled signings: Tony Blair has been forced to withdrawn from numerous public signings of his long-awaited memoir 'A Journey'

'No minutes are taken of meetings between prime ministers and monarchs and the convention is that no one ever speaks about them, so I didn't even attempt to find out what had been said.

'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.'

The gin and tonic reference is a nod to Mr Blair's admission in his memoirs that he became increasingly dependant on alcohol during his time in Downing Street.

Made up lines: Peter Morgan, the screenwriter of The Queen, claims he made the entire exchange up

Real life meeting: The authenticity of the quote by Queen Elizabeth II to Tony Blair has been challenged

Mr Blair's attempts to publicise his eagerly-awaited book have been marred by protests and the 57-year-old has been forced to cancel a number of signings during the last week.



In Dublin police clashed with protesters at a public signing on Saturday, leading to the former PM withdrawing from other public engagements.

However, the Evening Standard reported that hundreds of people queued at Waterstone's Piccadilly store to buy a copy signed behind closed doors.

The 500 signed copies are said to have all been sold in just over an hour this morning.

Almost 100,000 copies of 'A Journey' are believed to have been sold in only four days.

Quite sure about that one are you, Tony?

BY PAUL HARRIS

Intriguing questions arose yesterday over some of the anecdotes in Tony Blair's fascinating memoir. Are they the unvarnished truth? Or might Mr Blair have embroidered or misremembered some of the episodes he describes?

The spectre of a little embellishment was raised after striking discrepancies were exposed by the Daily Mail yesterday in the ex-premier's version of his conversations with Princess Diana about his disquiet over her romance with Dodi Fayed. He claimed to have had the tete-a-tete at chequers on July 6th, 1997- some two weeks before the Princess met Dodi.

It cannot be denied that Mr Blair has some form for spinning tall tales. He famously recalled memories of sitting behind the goal at newcastle United's st James's Park football ground in his youth, watching the great centre forward Jackie Milburn play. Unfortunately Milburn retired when Mr Blair was four years old and there was no seating behind the goal at any time in his career.

In another muddled recollection, Mr Blair once said that as a 14-year-old boy he ran away from home and boarded a jet at newcastle airport bound for the Bahamas. An interesting yarn, but actually impossible. There have never been any flights between the two places.

Here, we examine some of the more suspicious anecdotes in his book, A Journey.



URINATING KNIFEMAN

CLAIM: Mr Blair says he was going out to dinner one evening and at the end of the street where he and cherie lived in islington, north London: 'A bloke was urinating against a wall. I stopped.'

'What are you looking at?' said the man.

'You.' our fearless crusader replied. 'You shouldn't be doing it.'

Mr Blair continues: 'He took out a large knife from his coat. I walked on.'

Mr Blair says it was partly this confrontation which drove him to bring in controversial antisocial behaviour orders, and the now discredited respect agenda.

DOUBT: Mr Blair doesn't appear to have made much play of this alleged incident when he introduced the Asbo legislation. Nor is there any evidence he reported it to the police. With young children at home, Mr Blair might have been expected to report that there was a knifeman roaming the neighbourhood.

Could it be that Mr Blair imagines the episode retrospectively, to glamorise his largely unsuccessful attempt to crack down on antisocial behaviour?

BANK INDEPENDENCE

Independence: The Bank of England was handed the power to set interest rates in 1997

CLAIM: Mr Blair gives the clear impression that it was his idea to hand over responsibility to set interest rates directly to the Bank of England - and that he graciously allowed Gordon Brown to announce it to the Commons to make it appear that his Chancellor was a formidable, decisive 'big beast'.

He says: 'I allowed Gordon to make the statement and indeed gave him every paean of praise and status in becoming the major economic figure of the Government.'

Just to reinforce the point, he adds: 'So when I consciously and deliberately allowed Gordon to be out there as a big beast, as the acknowledged second most powerful figure in the Government, I did so without fear of being eclipsed or out-manoeuvred.'



DOUBT: Oh really? senior Labour sources were astonished yesterday at the what they described as a 'shameless' attempt to cream off the glory of what has long been hailed as Gordon Brown's initiative and his finest hour. One laughed out loud when he read it, he said. Another described the claim as 'utter trash', adding: 'Just ask yourself if the suggestion that Tony Blair "deliberately and consciously" allowed his arch rival Gordon Brown to steal the limelight can have the faintest ring of truth about it.'



JET DRAMA

CLAIM: Mr Blair came perilously close to having a passenger airliner blasted from the skies after it came into UK airspace soon after 9/11 and headed towards London without communicating with air traffic control. Fighter jets were said to have been scrambled and Mr Blair telephoned urgently at Chequers and asked by the RAF for authorisation to shoot the aircraft down if necessary.

He held back from making the decision 'trying desperately to get an instinct as to whether this was threat or mishap.' The deadline had already passed when he decided the jets should hold off. Moments later the aircraft, which had suffered a technical fault , regained communication.



DOUBT: Jets have repeatedly been scrambled in response to similar circumstances. However, they have never yet shot down a civil aircraft in British skies -before or after Mr Blair - so his claim to have saved 'hundreds of lives' looks a little far-fetched.



DEWAR ART COLLECTION

The then Prime Minister Tony Blair arrives with Scottish secretary Donald Dewar in Edingburgh after announcing plans for Scottish devolution

CLAIM: Donald Dewar, the First Minister of scotland, is one of a string of figures listed among friends, colleagues, heroes, celebrities and senior politicians who influenced or became part of the Blair world. What a popular chap that Tony Blair is...

This is what he says about Mr Dewar, who died suddenly in 2000: 'I had visited him a few weeks before his death... in his flat in new Town in Edinburgh... and was rather astounded to see his very valuable collection of scottish impressionists and prints.'



DOUBT: Donald Dewar didn't live in Edinburgh. His home was in Glasgow, where he kept his vast collection of works by Scottish colourists.



MOMENT OF MADNESS

Mr Blair campaigning with his then Welsh Secretary Ron Davies

CLAIM: Mr Blair claims authorship of the infamous phrase in Welsh secretary Ron Davies's explanation of how he came to be robbed by a male prostitute. The book says: 'In Ron's statement, which I helped to draft, I described it as "a moment of madness".



DOUBT: That phrase has long been ascribed to Alastair campbell, the word-wizard spin-doctor whom Mr Blair describes later as 'a genius'. Another scrupulously reliable purveyor of truth, Wikipedia, seems to endorse this view. It says Davies used the phrase 'at the urging of Tony Blair's press secretary Alastair campbell'.