Tony Blair, crime fiction author?

There’s a new  and amusing Facebook Group in town: Put One of Tony Blair’s Books in the Crime Section of Your Bookshop, and there’s some new evidence that they should at least be in Fiction generally.

The Torygraph (via Gawker) reports that contained within my Secret Boyfriend‘s autobiography is a passage cribbed, apparently, from the movie The Queen, and completely, utterly made up.

In A Journey, Blair claims that the Queen said to him: “You are my 10th prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born.” In [screenwriter Peter] Morgan’s script to the 2006 film The Queen, Mirren, in the title role, tells Michael Sheen’s Blair: “You are my 10th prime minister, Mr Blair. My first was Winston Churchill.”

As a longtime reader of Majesty Magazine, I can tell you that there is very, very little likelihood that the first quotation is correct. The Queen just does not express herself this way in a formal and historically loaded context. She would surely have said “Churchill” or “Winston Churchill” if she said anything. And the screenwriter is adamant that he didn’t base it on any facts, just made it up entirely. So, when you do your substitution at the bookstore, you’d best put his book with Crime Fiction rather than True Crime!