Tony Blair's account of meeting the Queen matches the fictional version of the event in the movie The Queen, says the scriptwriter (The Australian 10/9).
In Mr Blair's newly released memoir, A Journey, the former British prime minister recalls that as he went to kiss her hand at their first meeting in 1997 the Queen said: "You are my 10th prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born."
Peter Morgan's script for the Oscar-winning film starring Helen Mirren has the monarch saying: "You are my 10th prime minister, Mr Blair. My first was Winston Churchill."
Mr Morgan told Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper: "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'd never even seen it."
…meant as a hatchet job…
Incidentally, Mr. Morgan has previously admitted that he wrote the script with the intention of the film being a hatchet job on The Queen.
Justice and truth can prevail even against a jacobin writer. The viewers saw the great and glorious Sovereign they know, not what he hoped they would see.
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