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THE SCRIPTWRITER OF The Queen has claimed former British Prime Minister Tony Blair used dialogue from the film in his own autobiography.
Blair’s book A Journey was published in 2011, and came five years after Oscar-winning move The Queen, starring Helen Mirren.
The film depicts the events around the death of Princess Diana in 1997, and the UK Royal Family’s reaction to it. Blair is played by Michael Sheen.
Screenwriter Peter Morgan, who has also worked on series The Crown, said in an interview last week that Blair had a “blurred” memory and has been “pretending” he hasn’t watched the film, the Telegraph reported.
“There came a moment after the film that I wrote, The Queen, had come out where Tony Blair was asked about his audience with the Queen,” Morgan said.
And in his book, his autobiography, which, of course, came many years after we made the film The Queen, Tony Blair, when referring back to that critical period in the aftermath of Diana’s death, used a number of expressions and quotations that seemed to me to be very familiar because they sounded like my dialogue… I thought that I can’t have got it that right.
Morgan said that he and others involved in the film felt fairly confident about how Blair and the Queen would have approached the situation but “surely he didn’t say the very things that I’ve written (in the script) that he’d said?”.
He said he phoned colleagues to check whether they’d read Blair’s autobiography because “it sounded very much like the scene [he] wrote”.
And it seems that even Blair’s memory had sort of become blurred with what we had done… He said, ‘I then said that’. I was like, well, you didn’t. At least, I don’t think you did. Well, if you did, what a stroke of luck on my behalf. But I’m pretty sure you’re actually just quoting what I wrote, which you have watched and which you’ve subsequently denied that you’ve watched but which you’ve clearly watched.
Some examples include a section from the film where Blair – played by Sheen – tells his staff that he must “save this family from themselves” and, in his book, Blair wrote “I thought my job was to protect the monarchy”.
In another scene, the Queen’s private secretary says that Blair’s “people’s princess” speech is “over the top”, and Blair wrote that the phrase is “corny and over the top”.
When he has his first audience with the Queen after being elected Prime Minister, in the film she tells Blair “You are my tenth Prime Minister, Mr Blair. The first of course was Winston Churchill.”
In the book, Blair wrote that the Queen told him: “You are my tenth Prime Minister. The first was Winston.”
A spokesperson for Blair, however, said that the former prime minister hasn’t seen the film.
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And a superspreader is???
@The Thinker: Someone who is sick, fails to seek medical attention and highlight their sickness to authorities but yet continues to integrate in the community until they are too ill to do so.
Basically that ‘hero’ at work who doesn’t take sick days but probably should as they keep infecting the whole office.
Part of this was accelerated by witch doctors saying the experimental and supportive treatments , the WHO teams etc were a conspiracy by western govts to give them Ebola that made many afraid to ask for help
Idiot keyboard warriors from the west helped spread this too, saying things like the CDC held the patent on Ebola so must have created it in the lab. Others spewed uninformed nonsense like “it’s highly contagious ” and “what if a refugee from Africa sneezes on me in the A&E” Those who actually knew what we were talking about were ignored at first but thankfully once people had the facts laid out it turned around
@The Thinker: Someone with oversized testicles.
Remember, stay at home with the flu and don’t be opening the door to any super-spreaders.
A flu mutation and pandemic would kill way more than Ebola (and we’re overdue for one) and unlike a dozen Ebola cases which we could easily have handled with the usually empty isolation ward in the Mater our health service would totally collapse in its present form during a flu pandemic
We don’t have enough bed capacity for normal operations (we’re at least 5-6000 short minimum some would argue double that) let alone something where anything up to a third of the population could either be infected or convince themselves their cold is the mutated flu strain. We’re oddly better equipped to deal with the far less likely smallpox or Ebola or bubonic plague than the near certain flu mutation
Great piece of machinery on the farm, the old superspreader.
Just make sure it’s shots are up to date.
Also works in the pub.
Journal, thank you for my 2017 GF pet name on Valentines day! “Ebola Superspreader”
I was talking to my mother on the bus a few months ago and this yoke on the back seats was saying he got Ebola from his bird. I told him it wasn’t likely. He said he got a Ebola soup off his bird. I didn’t find it funny but he taught it was hilarious until he was getting off the bus and fell down the stairs. I had a good giggle.
Super spreader? Like the country girl at the disco……
@Shane Russell: Is that drink or bladder?
With global warming there will be more spread of diseases and a few new ones.
My aunt in the U.K. has a friend who has a viral disease as I found out a few days ago, the doctors do not know what the disease is as they never saw it before.
Is there a chance that the doctors are not trained well enought as that is possible but it is a thought, could we be living in a time where the advent of new diseases from global travel and global warming will spread and create diseases? Can you imagine super spreaders spreading superbugs, and the only defense we have might be in old herbal books on age old remedies?
WE WILL NEVER KNOW WHAT TOMORROW WILL BRING?
Like dung or lime spreaders?
have your say