Hansard corpus: Glasgow University website makes two centuries worth of Westminster speeches available online

The 1.6 billion word collection offers some unexpected insights into the way politicians use language

Words are usually what make a political career. Politicians are judged much more by what they say than by what, if anything, they actually do. Yet most of their words fade quickly from the memory, leaving just a few that seem to encapsulate what that particular politician was all about.

We remember that Tony Blair described himself as a “pretty straight sort of guy” and that Margaret Thatcher said that “there is no such thing as society”. What we forget is that a politician’s famous quotes are remembered precisely because they stood out as unusual remarks, featuring words not often heard from that politician’s lips.

The proof is in a new website, launched by Glasgow University, which offers free online access to every parliamentary speech delivered in Westminster parliamentary debates from 1803 to 2005.

Having all these millions of words in one site makes it possible to compute exactly how many words each politician used in a parliamentary lifetime, and which words they used most frequently.

Tony Blair’s favourite word, used 5,121 times in 2,888 speeches, was “people”. And here is a strange coincidence: while David Cameron was rising through the ranks of the Conservative Party, his most used word was also “people”. Or perhaps it was not a coincidence. Perhaps he was deliberately copying Blair. Yet “people” is also the word Jeremy Corbyn used most often in his long career on the Labour back benches – and surely he was not trying to copy Blair?

Then there was the Ulster firebrand, the late Ian Paisley, whose favourite word was also “people”. Given Dr Paisley’s religious fervour, you might have expected him to favour a word such as “Jesus”. But Dr Marc Alexander, of Glasgow University, has unearthed the peculiar statistic that, in the 1,248 speeches he delivered in Parliament, the Rev Paisley said “carpet” (18 mentions) more often than he said “Jesus” (16). But neither word made it into Dr Paisley’s top 30 most used words.

The word “people” also figured prominently in Margaret Thatcher’s speeches, though not so often as the word “year”, which popped up, on average, twice in every speech. That is strange, because although there are numerous memorable Thatcher quotes, none features the word “year”. “Society”, meanwhile, does not come into her top 30, any more than “straight” comes into Blair’s.

What is also notable is how sparing the Iron Lady was in her use of words. According to the computation carried out by Glasgow University, she uttered just 887,695 words during 33 years in Parliament, including 11 as Prime Minister. Tony Blair was an MP for only 24 years, yet he delivered more than 1.4 million words.

Even he was eclipsed by William Gladstone, who used more than 2.7 million words – but that was in a parliamentary career spanning 63 years.

And the lessons? Who knows? But party aides will be feverishly crunching the numbers even now, trying to discover the secret formulae hidden within.

The database can be found at hansard-corpus.org