Warhammer’s Most Evil Villain Was Margaret Thatcher

Warhammer has always been political, but it once took aim at the British Prime Minister in a fierce RPG

Warhammer used to be scathing. Warhammer used to be political. Warhammer used to be punk. Those are all things you can be when you’re a group of young sculptors and game designers starting a miniatures business from the ground up. Especially when you’re doing that in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Nowadays, Games Workshop is incredibly safe, thanks to its immense size and popularity. The company does more for the British economy than the entire fishing industry, so it can’t just take aim at politicians like it used to.

Coming from the north west, I was raised on anti-Thatcher sentiment, having it served up next to my tea most nights. My parents are old hippies in their own ways, too, so while they were open to me exploring my own political beliefs, I was raised to treat others with respect and be welcoming to all. I was never going to turn out a Tory with all that going on, really.

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I wonder what they thought when I started playing Warhammer. I started with The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game, which is innocuous enough, filled with Tolkien’s messages of interspecies cooperation. But what about when I turned to Warhammer 40,000, a game where the protagonists are a fascist empire intent on stomping out heretics and conquering anyone different from themselves? I’m 100 percent sure they had no idea of the lore of my toy soldiers, but if they had been aware, maybe their fears would have been assuaged by the fact I collected little fishmen who rose against the Imperium. With totalitarianism. Hmm. Maybe there are no good guys here.

I’m not being entirely serious here, and of course your favourite 40k faction has no bearing on your IRL political compass, otherwise you’d see legions of 12-year-old boys at far-right rallies in support of their Ultramarine overlords. Besides, the politics of 40k is only implied these days, and the satire has all but dried up. This is slightly problematic for the current game, but that’s a discussion for another time. Today I want to talk about the time that Warhammer took aim at Margaret Thatcher.

Warhammer is still political in its very being, but it used to be party political. Its first shots at the former Prime Minister were fired in 1986, when she was still very much in power. The September issue of White Dwarf that year had an Orc featured in the ‘Eavy Metal column. Upon this Orc’s banner was not the visage of some green dictator, nor the iconography of its brutal clan. It was a portrait of Thatcher, labelled “Mag-gies Death Banner”. If you’ve got Issue 81 lying around, you can check it out for yourself.

She later appeared in The Evil Within, a campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The name of the campaign itself is a reference to one of Thatcher’s speeches, where she infamously said, “We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.” She was, of course, talking about the striking miners who feared for their livelihoods in the face of countless mine closures under her regime. The Empress Magraritha (also spelled Magritta) is a clear satirical representation of Thatcher, ascending to power in 1979, the same year as the British Prime Minister.

This is little more than a throwaway joke, but Warhammer already had a history with the subject of miner’s strikes by this point. Earlier in 1986, The Tragedy of McDeath campaign parodied Scottish stereotypes from sectarian football rivalries, to affinities for whiskey, to the Loch Ness Monster, all under the guise of a Shakespeare storyline. However, the characters involved in the Battle of Dungal Hill are even more politically charged.

Een McWrecker leads an army of Orcs against Arka Zargul’s Dwarfs, who themselves are suffering miners. If those names aren’t recognisable to you, Ian MacGregor was responsible for shutting down countless mines under Thatcher’s orders, and Arthur Scargill was the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers during the strikes in 1984 and 1985, who later founded the Socialist Labour Party.

The political message of McDeath is clear. Arka Zargul’s plucky, stoic Dwarfs are downtrodden and beaten, they’re sympathetic heroes of the tale. On the other hand, Een McWrecker and his band of unruly Orcs – already a beacon of evil in popular fantasy culture – were brutal and villainous. Games Workshop was taking sides, and it wasn’t batting for Thatcher.

Shortly after Games Workshop started selling off the retail rights to games like Dungeons & Dragons, its political satire moved from overtly left-leaning to non-existent as it started to rely on its own IP to make money. It wanted to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, and decrying the horrors of Conservative government wasn’t a part of its vision for doing so.

In another universe, Warhammer would still be a satirical miniatures game. Perhaps we would have had Toe-knee Flare, a fiery leader who rules with an iron boot and forces his conscripted force into foreign wars under false pretences? Maybe we would have had a Draxit campaign as Drakenburg tries to cut itself off from the Old World to improve trade relations with Nehekhara?

Games Workshop is too big, too family-friendly, and too scared to make such political campaigns any more, but there’s a universe where it continued upon its satirical trajectory and remained a niche, punk usurper writing campaigns that poked fun at politicians to this day. We can take solace in one thing at least: Empress Magraritha is dead.

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Ben is a Features Editor at TheGamer. You can read his work in Eurogamer, The Guardian, IGN, Kotaku, The Loadout, NME, VICE, or on Twitter @BenSledge.