Blair copied dialogue from The Queen, says writer

In the latest controversy to hit Tony Blair's memoir A Journey, the screenwriter Peter Morgan has accused the former Prime Minister of borrowing lines from his film The Queen. Morgan has told the Daily Telegraph that he suspects that Blair lifted dialogue, not from an actual meeting with the monarch, but from lines spoken by Helen Mirren in the 2006 Oscar-winning movie.

Blair's account of meeting Queen Elizabeth II on his first day in office in 1997 was already controversial - with the Queen reportedly displeased that Blair had put it in his book, along with another passage in which he recalls Prince Philip manning the barbecue at a Windsor family gathering. Now Morgan has stepped forward to claim the 1997 meeting was fictional.

As Blair recalls it in his memoir, the monarch said to him: "You are my 10th prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born."

In the parallel scene from the film The Queen, Helen Mirren's monarch tells Michael Sheen's Blair: "You are my 10th prime minister, Mr Blair. My first was Winston Churchill."

Morgan told the Telegraph that he had made up the dialogue without any background information. "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.

Morgan has several theories on how the account by Blair, who claims he has never seen The Queen, ended up so similar to his screenplay.

"There are three possibilities," he told the newspaper. "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."

Last night a spokesman for Random House, the publishers of A Journey, repeated Blair's assertion that he has never seen The Queen, adding that Morgan's claim was merely "a good PR gambit by Morgan to direct folks to their [film streaming service] Netflix queue". ·