"We are all very much Team Hoyle": Jo Mills reflects on her 20 years in Westminster
Jo Mills (Photography by Jessica Taylor, UK Parliament)
7 min read
Jo Mills, office support manager in the Speaker’s Office, has worked in Parliament for 20 years. From doorkeeping, to helping outgoing MPs leave, to making sure the Speaker’s tortoise gets her five a day, she sits down with Sophie Church to reflect on her time in Westminster
Riding the Tube home one day, back in 2002, Jo Mills saw an advert in the Evening Standard for a doorkeeper job in Parliament. Thinking it was a bit of a long-shot, she applied, and was successful.
“Being younger, you just have that confidence,” she says, “and you think: what’s the worst thing they can say? Sometimes I look back and think if I could just be more like that now, it would be good.”
But today, as she looks back over 20 years of working in Parliament, that “confidence of youth” appears to have served her well. After roles in the Serjeant at Arms directorate, the Accommodation Office, the Office of the Chief Executive (now the Governance Office) and elsewhere in Parliament, Mills is currently an office support manager in the Speaker’s Office, where she intends to stay.
Maybe that’s why there is that element of friendship, and people are genuinely nice to each other; you just don’t know when you might be working together again
“I feel like it’s being part of something quite special,” she says. “Obviously I didn’t come in right at the beginning in November 2019 [from the start of Sir Lindsay’s tenure as Speaker] but I would have liked to if I had had the opportunity. So I feel like now I’m in, I’m here. That’s my commitment.”
After working in Parliament for so many years, Mills jokes about becoming institutionalised. However her first few weeks at the Palace came as a shock. “I didn’t think I was going to last the week,” she says, frankly. “I think on my first day I felt so like a fish out of water, it just felt like the most bizarre place I had ever visited. My school had never done a school trip to Parliament, so my first experience of seeing the estate, walking into Westminster Hall [and] seeing the House of Commons Chamber was my first day at work. It was really quite mind-blowing.”
Each evening, she says she would dial onto the internet to find out what certain words meant. “Everyone just seemed to know everything,” she explains, “and I felt quite in awe of that.”
Rules of where you could and could not go in Parliament were stricter back then, she adds. This may explain why, when she wandered accidentally into an almost-mythic lady members’ lounge, she froze with embarrassment.
“I just remember there being some lovely pinkish, dusky pink sofas, some nice lamps, and I think it was [the late Tory MP and former 1922 Committee chair] Cheryl Gillan… I was so embarrassed. And even after that I was thinking: ‘oh, my gosh, she’s going to report me.’”
Cheryl Gillan (Credit: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo)
As a doorkeeper, one of Mills’s tasks – asides from knowing the Palace layout – was to distribute name tags for committee members before they sat down. “That used to bring me out in cold sweats,” she laughs. “I probably did make mistakes or mix somebody up with somebody else but the clerk never said.”
Back then, Mills said the younger generation were in the minority, so would band together, unsurprisingly perhaps, at the pub. “We tended to…go out socially, usually Thursday nights at Bellamy’s Bar, which is now a nursery,” she says. “That used to be the main hangout, because the other youthful group of people within the organisation tended to be members of staff. It was quite a fun place to go and mix.”
Mills would eventually marry one of the Bellamy’s group, Alex, who was working in finance in the Serjeant’s department at the time. “We met in 2005…in 2013 we got married and in 2016 we had our son. The rest is history!”
While Covid saw the couple “trying to find their space” working from home, she says that they never found it difficult working together in Westminster. “One of the benefits of this organisation is it is quite large, so you can have a relationship or friendship or whatever without having to see that person every day,” she says.
After a year as doorkeeper, Mills was promoted into the Serjeant at Arms’ Office as an administrative assistant, then again into the Accommodation Office, where she organised staff moves between offices – particularly interesting she says – during cabinet reshuffles.
“It was just fascinating because I thought I knew quite a lot of the estate from being a doorkeeper,” she says. “But being in the Accommodation Office, you get to see where all the Members’ offices are…one of the corridors is referred to as ‘The Yellow Submarine’; it’s just very narrow and it’s got almost like little portholes as windows…there’s accommodation in all nooks and crannies.”
In 2019, after the general election, Mills was charged with managing the exit of outgoing Members – collecting their equipment and informing them of next steps. It “obviously must be really unpleasant… for the Member of Parliament,” she says, “especially if they were not intending to or thinking they were going to lose their seat, and obviously for their staff. So I felt quite honoured to be given that kind of project to run.”
Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle, with whom Mills now works (Credit: Planetpix / Alamy Stock Photo)
Mills notes that the way in which parliamentarians and staff on the estate are supported has generally changed for the better. “I don’t know how controversial it is to say it,” she says, “but I think having the grievance process, and I think actually having so much support for staff through the… Employee Assistance Programme – I’ve not had the opportunity to use it – but I just think that that is such a massive benefit.”
And being invited to staff parties was a fun perk of the job, says Mills. “Our friend in Black Rod’s office would always get us invited to their little Christmas party… I don’t know if they still have parties, but they used to. And likewise, we used to have big Serjeants parties, which they don’t do any more now, but they used to book out the whole Attlee Suite,” she says.
Mills has made many friends within Parliament over the years, and says the parliamentary community is one of the reasons she has stayed working here so long. “If you work here long enough, you usually end up coming around and working again with the same people… it’s nice,” she adds. “Maybe that’s why there is that element of friendship, and people are genuinely nice to each other; you just don’t know when you might be working together again.”
She speaks proudly about launching the first clerk’s apprentice scheme when she worked in Parliament’s diversity and inclusion team. As well as being a “standout moment” – Mills made it into the Evening Standard for her efforts – she now works with one of the apprentices in the Speaker’s Office. “That’s why it’s good to be friendly to people,” she says.
Now, Mills is happy to have found a “quite special” role in the Speaker’s Office. “I feel that particularly in the Speaker’s office, there is a real kind of sense of unity. We are all very much Team Hoyle,” she says.
As we wrap up the interview, Mills nearly forgets to mention perhaps her most vital parliamentary role to date: feeding Sir Lindsay’s African tortoise, Maggie. “If I have got any greens at home that are going to get composted, then I bring them in for her,” she says. “She is just amazing.”
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