MORGAN SUSPECTS BLAIR'S MEMOIR MAY HAVE BORROWED A SCENE FROM 'THE QUEEN' (TELE, NYT)

By Nancy Tartaglione

Tony Blair's new memoir has spilled a lot of ink over the past several days with regard to the former Prime Minister's musings on serious issues. Yesterday, however, a new -- and lighter -- twist emerged as "The Queen" screenwriter, Peter Morgan, told The Telegraph he suspects a scene in the book between Queen Elizabeth and Blair may have come from the Oscar-winning movie, rather than actually having taken place.

"You are my 10th prime minister," Queen Elizabeth tells Blair when she meets him at Buckingham Palace on his first day in office in 1997, the book, "A Journey: My Political Life," reads. "The first was Winston. That was before you were born," the queen says.

According to reports, the queen has been disturbed by the quotes given that it is considered a serious faux pas for prime ministers to dish on private encounters with the royals.

Now it turns out that the queen may not have even said the words Blair puts in her mouth in the book.

In "The Queen," Helen Mirren as Elizabeth, greets Michael Sheen as Blair, saying in part: "You are my 10th prime minister, Mr. Blair. My first was Winston Churchill."

Morgan told the Telegraph, "I wish I could pretend that I had inside knowledge, but I made up those lines. 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."

A spokesman for Blair's publisher Knopf asserted that the accusation is merely "a good P.R. gambit by Morgan to direct folks to their Netflix queue," according to The New York Times.

Maybe Blair will enlighten US audiences next week when he visits "The Daily Show."