STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, July 28, 2026…..The United Kingdom’s top parliamentary official spent last Thursday afternoon surrounded by campaign buttons, political mailers and decades of partisan history inside the Massachusetts State House — an unlikely backdrop for a parliamentarian whose office requires him to leave politics behind.
Fresh from addressing senators beneath the golden dome, Speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle ducked into the State House press gallery for an interview with the News Service. The room, once the noisy nerve center of Beacon Hill journalism, sat nearly silent on a summer Thursday, its walls still crowded with faded bumper stickers from long-lost Massachusetts campaigns, weathered yard signs and other political relics collected over decades.
The setting was ironic: Hoyle, who by convention relinquished his Labour Party affiliation upon becoming speaker in 2019, now serves as one of Britain’s few explicitly apolitical constitutional figures.
His chief of staff requested he not be photographed in the room and watched the interview carefully, once shaking her head as Hoyle laughed after being asked about his relationship with the Trump administration.
Hoyle’s visit to Massachusetts followed meetings in Washington marking the nation’s 250th anniversary and completed what he described as a reciprocal exchange with U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, whom he hosted in London last year.
“Quite rightly, I had Speaker Johnson come to London at the beginning of the 250th,” Hoyle said. “He came to me; that was the away game for it, and it was my away game to go back to Washington.”
But Massachusetts, he suggested, deserved more than a stopover.
“When you’re coming all this way across the pond, I actually wanted to touch on a bit more history,” he said. “Massachusetts, what a wonderful state. So much history was made here. Such a great relationship back to the United Kingdom. I wanted to be part of that.”
For Hoyle, the trip was also personal. He represents Chorley in Lancashire, home to Duxbury Hall, the ancestral seat of the Standish family. Myles Standish, military leader of Plymouth Colony and a passenger on the Mayflower, carried that name across the Atlantic when he helped establish Duxbury, Massachusetts.
In remarks before the Senate, Hoyle noted that “these ties stretch back centuries” and told lawmakers during his speech that the American Revolution was fought not only on American battlefields but also in fierce parliamentary debates at Westminster over representation, executive power and whether coercion could ever produce lasting peace.
“This is a new beginning of a new 250,” Hoyle said later in his interview with the News Service. “We’ve got to build on the previous 250 and move forward.”
That future, in Hoyle’s telling, depends less on who is in power in a given election year than on institutions that outlast political trends.
Over the tenure of three speakers of the U.S. House — Democrat Nancy Pelosi and Republicans Kevin McCarthy and Johnson — Hoyle said his own role has remained deliberately above party politics.
“I don’t come with the baggage of a political party,” he said. “I come as somebody who is neutral, somebody who can speak to all sides.”
He said he has close connections with both Pelosi and Johnson. (He said he got on with Pelosi “like a house on fire” and described his bond with Johnson as “a working relationship.”)
His main priority? “We’ve got to promote democracy,” he said.
“Both Speaker Johnson and myself work very closely. We call out the Russians, we call out the aggression, and the intimidation to the rest of Europe, and I believe that is so important for us,” he said. “And my values are shared in the rights of the people to choose who they wish to lead them, and we’ve got to try to ensure that — we’ve seen democracy in decline at the moment.”
Asked how Massachusetts fits into the U.S.-U.K. relationship during the Trump administration, Hoyle laughed before glancing toward his chief of staff, who responded with a firm shake of the head.
“I’ve got to watch that I don’t get too political,” he said, carefully pivoting away from Washington.
Instead he returned repeatedly to what he sees as Massachusetts’s enduring ties to Britain: universities, biotechnology, research partnerships and trade.
“The educational links are second to none,” he said, pointing to the steady exchange of students and researchers between Harvard University, Cambridge, Oxford and other institutions.
Those exchanges, he argued, should continue even as competition for scientific talent intensifies globally.
Gov. Maura Healey and other Massachusetts leaders warn that federal immigration policies and visa uncertainty could drive international students and researchers elsewhere, threatening two of the state’s economic pillars: higher education and biotechnology.
Asked whether the U.K. had seen an influx of international students who otherwise might have ended up at American universities, Hoyle quipped, “I hope so.”
But he quickly broadened the point, saying he was less concerned about researchers moving between Britain and the United States than about both countries losing talent elsewhere.
“The worry is that we lose the best of America and the best of British that may be working out in China. That gives me a bigger worry,” he said. “R&D is everything.”
The same theme surfaced when discussing clean energy.
Hoyle praised offshore wind and emerging technologies, but argued the U.K. and U.S. should cooperate more aggressively on nuclear power, tidal energy and carbon capture while reducing dependence on Chinese manufacturing.
“We should be sharing and working on that, and we’ve got to persuade other countries that this is the way forward,” he said. “But at the same time, you can’t close off oil and gas fields. Far from it. We still need them. They are part of that mixed use. … What I want to do is give people a choice.”
His rhetoric mirrored Healey’s “all-of-the-above” approach to energy, which she has trumpeted as energy costs have climbed in recent years. Though she entered office labeling herself a “climate governor,” she now promotes more mixed use of both clean energy and fossil fuels, claiming it will lower costs in the meantime while still investing in the future.
Healey and Hoyle both see economic opportunity especially in so-called green jobs.
“We should be investing in the U.K. in those jobs,” Hoyle said. “The same in the States. Green jobs is the future. We’ve got to do that. We’ve got to work together on it.”
Hoyle’s answers often drifted toward history. Asked about President Donald Trump’s high tariffs on foreign goods, Hoyle reached back to the Boston Tea Party.
“America was built on freedom, wasn’t it?” he said. “The whole idea of tipping tea in the water is about the freedom to be able to exchange foods.”
Then, smiling, he added, “Free trade has got to be the answer.”
The conversation grew lighter from there.
Following the World Cup this summer and proposals for more international soccer tournaments in Massachusetts, would his country come back to play?
“Of course,” Hoyle replied, before launching into an affectionate defense of Bolton Wanderers, the struggling club his family has supported for generations, despite the pull of larger and more successful nearby clubs Manchester United and Manchester City. “I always believe in your home club. Stick with it.”
On the World Cup, Hoyle jokingly credited Scottish tourists and British consulate staff with promoting the United Kingdom one pub at a time, before teasing that local establishments “ran out of beer, except Bud Light.”
And when offered one final, “soft” question, Hoyle lit up at the topic.
Reminded of his meeting with Jonathan, the 194-year-old “turtle” on the island of St. Helena, he interrupted first to deliver a correction.
“Why do Americans always call them turtles?” he asked. “Turtles swim. He’s a tortoise!”
He recalled giving Jonathan “a high five” predicting the giant tortoise still had “another 50 years in him,” and, as an animal lover whose own household has included dogs, cats, ducks, hens, parrots and tortoises, reflected that “certain things … move you. And Jonathan was one.”
For much of the afternoon, Hoyle spoke about democracy, constitutional traditions and the next 250 years of Anglo-American relations. Yet in a room cluttered with old campaign slogans and political memorabilia, perhaps the clearest illustration of his office came in the moments he chose not to answer — a parliamentary speaker surrounded by politics, carefully trying not to practice it.