Fallout London recruits former Speaker of the House John Bercow as voice actor

There’s no order in Fallout’s run-down, dry vision of the future, so we’re not entirely sure how former Speaker of the House John Bercow ended up on the game’s voice cast.

Yes, the bogeyman of the Leave camp and Nigel Farage’s latest punching bag has lent his voice to the upcoming fan project.

An ambitious expansion to 2015’s blockbuster Fallout 4, which itself was recently updated for PS5, Fallout London sees players battling warring factions in a post-apocalyptic version of the British capital. It will be the first time the series has ventured beyond the borders of its scarred future America.

One of the characters players will encounter in the upcoming expansion (or “mod,” as it’s known in gamer-speak) will be a robotic House speaker, voiced (appropriately) by Bercow. And he may be just as unreliable as the other droids in the retro-futuristic video game series. In a voice clip shared on the game’s Discord, Mr. Bercow can be heard repeating the word “order” before the audio begins to distort.

Does this mean the 61-year-old former MP for Buckingham is a Fallout fan? Is there a hidden games room in the Houses of Parliament that we don’t know about, where politicians sneak off between sessions to play a round of Mario Kart and Fallout?

Or perhaps Bercow, like so many others, was converted after watching the hit Amazon series. We’re not sure how this unusual partnership came about, but it’s definitely one that will go down in the gaming history books.

Bercow, who resigned as Speaker of the House of Commons in 2019 after a decade at the helm, was last seen in March when he left the U.S. version of the psychological reality TV show “The Traitors.”

He joins a voice cast that includes video game veterans Neil Newbon (Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3), Anna Demetriou (Sophia in A Plague Tale: Requiem) and two Doctor Who actors: Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker.

“Imagine being Fallout: London and being so lucky to have all these talented voice actors on the team, but then the whole thing is compounded by the fact that we have two Doctor Who actors as voice actors… then Neil Newbon writes to us and wants a role too,” the game’s project manager Dean “Prilladog” Carter wrote on Discord.

“But the icing on the cake? Who better to portray our mod’s version of the Speaker of the House than a robot version with the voice of John Bercow himself.”

Fallout London was supposed to be coming to PC soon after it was suddenly delayed by the release of the next-gen update for Fallout 4 in late April. However, the developers recently announced that the mod will not work with Fallout 4 on the Epic Games Store due to a lack of feature support, but will run through distributor GOG and Steam.

While the Fallout series isn’t exactly known for its celebrity voice talent, it has featured a number of A-list celebrities, including Liam Neeson in Fallout 3 (who, along with fellow Hollywood star Ron Perlman, reportedly turned down the chance to return for the upcoming mod) and the late Matthew Perry in Fallout: New Vegas.