Is Kemi Badenoch addicted to World of Warcraft?

J’accuse blogs

Kemi Badenoch said something exceedingly strange at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday. During a back and forth about Iran – Badenoch, unlike Starmer believes it is in the national interest for Britain to bomb this country – Badenoch called the entire Labour party a ‘sea of Orcs and Goons’ whilst gesticulating wildly.

Goon is a weird term to use, but far, far, far, far stranger is the use of the term ‘Orcs’. Orcs? She called a room full of people she doesn’t like ‘orcs’??? A look at Hansard will tell you that this is the first time the phrase ‘Orcs’ has been used in Parliament ever.^[1] But even in the outside world it is a strange term. I have only seen ‘orcs’ used as an insult for a group of people by minor extreme right X accounts who use ‘orcs’ to refer to migrants in the third world. Badenoch is known to be fairly online (she spent a period of her early 20s posting on online blogs) but this seems an unlikely explanation for fairly obvious reasons.

As soon as I saw this video I started to Google around, until I found myself on a website which serves as a sort of directory for World of Warcraft players. And what I saw there brought great levity into my life, which I felt I had to share with my audience. Behold:

And then, elsewhere on the website (look to the middle entry):

If this is what I think it is, the leader of the opposition may have an account on World of Warcraft where she is a level 51 Gnome Warlock.

But there is even more to this story. Because the particular version of World of Warcraft to which the gamer name ‘Kemibadenoch’ is currently registered, is something called ‘WOWclassic Fresh’, which was released on the 20^th anniversary of the game being released, meaning that it was released in November 2024.

That means that this character who has reached level 51 (the maximum level is 60), could only have been created after Kemi Badenoch became leader of the Tory Party on the 2^nd of November 2024. She may have been spending her time power levelling a Gnome Warlock on WOW classic whilst taking the world’s oldest political party from leading in the polls to facing almost total extinction (ten seats) at the next election per Gorton and Denton. I’ve made this helpful chart for visualising the possible relationship between her gaming and the Tories fading fortunes:

This would explain why Badenoch accused the Labour party of being a bunch of Orcs. World of Warcraft released a new expansion (Midnight) on Monday, which would have focused her mind on the game. It is plausible, likely perhaps, that Badenoch has been kept up late at night playing her computer games and that she has begun to hallucinate Orcs (who are very important in World of Warcraft) when she is looking at groups of people. When I was a teenager I experienced something similar after playing Call of Duty Zombies into the early hours, fuelled by cans of Monster energy.

Now, it is quite possible that ‘Kemibadenoch’ is named simply by a superfan who also enjoys the virtual world of Azeroth. But consider who Badenoch is. Born in 1980, Badenoch would have been 24 the time that World of Warcraft was released (in 2004). Kemi was living a lonely and isolated existence in an unfashionable part of South London, earning a living working on computers. She had just graduated from the University of Sussex, where she had been lonely, having missed the grades for Warwick. This was not how life was meant to be, she had been born with great expectations (her family in Nigeria are exquisitely politically networked) which she was failing to meet having underperformed academically. It was around this time that she joined the Conservative Party so that she could have a bit more of a social life.

Apart from the fact that she was a black woman, she was the exact sort of person you would expect to take an interest in fantasy MMORPGs, and the popular MMORPG at that specific moment was World of Warcraft. If you look at the biographies of the members of the Yogscast, which originated as a guild on World of Warcraft there are clear similarities. Lewis Brindley, b 1983, failed to get his grades for Cambridge and ended up at Manchester and was struggling to establish himself as a freelance writer when he started to play WOW. Simon Lane, b.1978 was a security guard at an old people’s home. ‘Sips’ was a programmer (like Kemi). Doing odd jobs and seeking out an online fantasy world where they would get to be the heroes, not the zeroes.

The next part of the story, perhaps, is that she becomes Tory leader, finds that it is actually very difficult and time consuming (some of the reasons for which are out of her control), and so retreats into her comfort zone. After the terrible local elections last year it was said that Badenoch spent hours on the sofa doomscrolling, I can quite understand why she would also seek to find refuge with the dark elves and the misty pandas.

Where does this leave us? If Kemi is not just a gamer, but a gaming addict, we may have to weaken our criticism of her as a professional courtesy. I personally have never played World of Warcraft because my parents didn’t trust me using their debit card online (because of 2000s scare stories about kids racking up 30 grand bills online shopping) so I had to make to do with Free-to-Play Old School Runescape. If Badenoch had called Starmer a Greater Demon, and his backbenchers a bunch of imps, and demanded that they give over their coloured beads, I’d look at her very differently indeed.

Who knows? If Badenoch was to slip a few references to Skyrim in Prime Minister’s Questions, as a sort of flag-raising exercise, she may earn herself a few warm words in these pages…

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^[1] There are five other references to the term being used (going back to 1899), in each case ORCS is an acronym denoting something else.