TONY BLAIR HAS rubbished suggestions that he plagiarised his first audience with the Queen of England from a fictionalised account portrayed in a film.

In his book, Blair recalls the Queen saying to him at their meeting: “You are my tenth prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born.”

The words are remarkably similar to those used in the 2006 Oscar-winning film The Queen, written by Peter Morgan – however, Morgan says he made them up.

Morgan said that Blair had either chosen to rip off the film version, or had had “one gin and tonic too many and confused the scene in the film with what had actually happened”.

Blair has claimed that he never watched the film.

Speaking on BBC Radio 2, he laughed off suggestion that after seeing the film he mixed up what he saw with reality, saying:

I hope Peter Morgan is being tongue-in-cheek about this. I can’t believe that they would have written the movie without talking to somebody.

I have told this story many times because I always think it’s quite a funny story. Are you suggesting I plagiarised it from the film?

I don’t think that it is terribly odd because, as I say, it is a story that I have often told so maybe someone heard it and said it to him, but it is what happened.