IT was a parliamentary speech which not only announced the Deputy Prime Minister's resignation from the Cabinet but also set the wheels in motion for the downfall of Margaret Thatcher.

Geoffrey Howe's biting words in the House of Commons 25 years ago have gone down in history as one of the most memorable speeches to come from Westminster.

Now his address is forming part of a new online resource which has been launched by Glasgow University, spanning more than 200 years of political history.

From Sir Winston Churchill's wartime speeches to rebukes to Denis Skinner MP, the website includes 7.6 million speeches and 1.6 billion words.

Dr Marc Alexander, director of Historical Thesaurus of English, University of Glasgow, said: “This launch is part of our SAMUELS project to look at the meanings of huge collections of text and lets us really uncover the ways MPs and Lords speak in Parliament and what they discuss."

Having reached crisis point with regards to Mrs Thatcher's approach to Europe, Mr Howe told his fellow MPs in November 1990: “It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.”

The Prime Minister resigned just days later and the devastating speech by Mr Howe, who died last month aged 88, was widely seen as being a pivotal part of that decision.

However, the online archive also includes Dennis Healey's famous riposte, as he likened part of Mr Howe's speech to "being savaged by a dead sheep".

The database, which can be found at www.hansard-corpus.org, was compiled by linguists and historians and breaks down words and terms favoured by individual politicians - from Mrs Thatcher's use of the words "resource" and "negotiation" to Mr Blair's keywords of "summit" and "pensioner".

In more than 3,000 speeches which Sir Winston made about World War II, the most common verb he used was "fight".

The archives, spanning 1803 until 2005, show Robert Burns is mentioned 428 times, Shakespeare 23,000 times and even James Bond is cited 132 times.

But it is Mr Skinner who wins his way into the history books with one accolade - as the person who has been told to "shut up" the most in Parliament.

Mr Alexander said: "No-one can possibly read all 1.6 billion words, so what our team has done is develop all sorts of new ways of digging into that information and letting people search for it.

"It’s being launched today, November 5, which is the 410th anniversary of the day Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament – but we’re hoping to open up Parliament in a rather different way.”