What were the greatest parliamentary speeches of the past 100 years? Lloyd George battling for the People's Budget of 1909? Churchill defiant in 1940? Nye Bevan championing his blueprint for the NHS? Geoffrey Howe's unexpectedly lethal dispatch of Margaret Thatcher in his resignation speech – in a deadly bit of jargon, his "personal statement" – on 13 November 1990?  It's a game anyone who is politically minded can play and Hansard – which is celebrating its centenary as the in-house (as distinct from 19th century-contracted-out) official report – has been doing just that to mark the occasion.  It's full of events and speeches you remember, vaguely or because you watched them on TV. Most involve war and peace, economic crisis, basic liberties or divisive social issues.  But there are also great issues which are now in cobwebs and less famous names forgotten. Who now recalls that Labour's first leader, Keir Hardie, made a moving, prescient speech against denying the vote to black South Africans when the country got its post-Boer war independence in 1909?  And what does the once-celebrated name ED Morel mean today? He was the Liverpool shipping clerk who led the brilliant campaign against the enslavement of the Congo by Leopold, King of the Belgians (Sir Roger Casement was Morel's doomed ally). Morel became a pacifist, later a Labour MP, albeit too much of a troublemaker to achieve office under Ramsay MacDonald.  The volume contains Morel's heartfelt Commons maiden speech in 1922, warning against the punitive reparations imposed on beaten Germany. It is poignant, but so is Sir Edward Grey's report to MPs on the plunge into war in August 1914.  The links in this article all come from Hansard's still not completed archive, a treasure that I knew was there, but had not previously dipped into. I shall be back.  Hansard asked 46 distinguished figures, mostly living peers and MPs, plus a few officials and observers, to choose their favourite from 1909 to 2009. It has now published the results in a £25 volume the size of an old-fashioned telephone directory.  Gordon Brown picked Edward Heath's "forensic" destruction of the Tory case for restoring hanging in 1981, David Cameron his own distant relative Duff Cooper's anti-appeasement speech on resigning from the Chamberlain government in 1938. Another of those deadly "personal statements" that litter the grey pages of Hansard.  Nick Clegg opted for the pro-Europe speech of his then-party leader, the later disgraced Jeremy Thorpe, in May 1967 – after de Gaulle's veto on British membership. Mischievous and far-sighted, Clegg calls it.  "A speech for the ages," Brown says of Heath on hanging, the then-new Labour MP attracted to it as an ethical issue. Not all the speeches are immediately obvious in the Hansard format; for anyone interested, Heath spoke at 4.45pm.  Each contributor gets a page to explain their choice.  All the speeches I mentioned above were picked, though the charm lies in the detail. For instance, no less than four senior Tories picked the Howe speech – Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine and John Major, its chief beneficiary.  So did Nigel Lawson, who was told that three was enough and asked to pick another. So he perversely chose Neil Kinnock's disappointing speech on the Westland row of 1986, which nearly toppled Thatcher, but didn't, thanks to the Labour leader's misjudged contribution.  It was Kinnock who chose his hero Bevan's speech, moving the second reading of the NHS bill on 30 April 1946. Tony Benn also selected a Bevan legend: the speech Nye made on resigning from the government over NHS charges and military spending on the Korean war in April 1951. It is a pretty good speech, but also the death knell of the 1945 Labour government. Lessons there still for both pragmatists and purists.  Less predictably, Bevan's scornful speech on Anglo-French deception during the Suez crisis of 1956 was picked by the late Jim Callaghan, no Bevanite he. And the late former Tory cabinet minister and Fleet Street editor William ("Dear Bill") Deedes also selected a Bevan speech, this time closing a defence debate in February 1951.  Here we catch the minister of labour, backbench scourge of Churchill during the second world war, boldly crossing swords on defence matters with the ex-and-future premier – the miner v the aristocrat – and warning against excessive rearmament, the issue over which he would shortly resign. Do not fear the Soviets too much when they produce 25m tons of steel a year and the west can manage 140m tons, he said.  That is a pretty impressive basic argument which Bevan (no softie on the Russians) often used against cold war excesses. It is striking how well speeches in this volume stand up when they are rooted in firm principle, not transient fashion, and marry principle with practical politics.  By my imperfect maths Bevan wins the non-contest for most selections with four entries to Churchill's three. Roy Hattersley picks Lloyd George's four-and-a-half hour 1909 budget speech – one of the century's great dramas – and Elfyn Llwyd, the Plaid Cymru leader, Lloyd George's 1911 speech introducing national insurance – a godsend for millions.  The trio of LG, Churchill and Bevan – one from each main party – were, by general consent, I think, the most important parliamentary orators of the century, their words and weight combined.  But due recognition is given to others. Michael Foot's Falklands war speech of April 3 1982 was picked by ex-MP Robert Kilroy-Silk, who recalls being keen at the time that the Labour leader leader, speaking immediately after the humiliated Margaret Thatcher, should back the reconquest in the name of freedom and international law.  That was how they saw it. Time sometimes changes perspectives on these events.  Foot's defiant performance, winding up a debate he knew would be lost, as Labour fell on a confidence vote in 1979 (the first such defeat since 1841) was picked by Ian Paisley. "The greatest speeches do not always end in the greatest victories," the Ulsterman notes.  Enoch Powell, Foot's friend and rival in eloquence, is cited for his speech proposing a law against embryo research by Ann Widdecombe; but also by Denis Healey, no less, for the powerful ("worthy of Demosthenes") attack Powell made in 1959 against covered-up British imperial brutality at the Hola camp in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency.  He was speaking at 1.15am in company with a bunch of lefties, "far from being the racist bigot" he was later labelled, Lord Healey dryly notes.  Geoffrey Howe himself chooses Harold Macmillan's 1961 declaration of intent to join the future EU, the issue on which he broke a Tory prime minister 29 years later. But Mrs T's first chancellor gets a second selection for his 1981 budget speech – the crucial turning point for Thatcherite economics. The Sun's Trevor Kavanagh, who picked it, is more confident than I am in 2009 that they got it all right.  Robin Cook's resignation speech over the government's decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003 is picked by Shirley Williams ("an extraordinary prophecy," she calls it), as is his forensic dissection of the 1996 Scott report on covert arms UK sales to Iraq in the 1980s, picked by the Speaker, Michael Martin, no less.  Barbara Castle, another powerful voice in a small frame (another redhead too), is selected by Patricia Hewitt for her second reading speech on the equal pay bill in 1970. Few women feature in this volume, but Margaret Thatcher's magnificent last speech as PM is rightly picked as memorable by both Norman Tebbit and the BBC's dancing pundit John Sergeant. It was Labour's revenge for 1979 and much else – but it did not feel like that on the day.  I was present on that occasion, as on many others in this engrossing volume. Its lack of a decent index is maddening, but I am unexpectedly fascinated by it – and by the choices made.  What would I have made if asked? Probably one of the above, though it would have been better to have dug up a lost gem.  David Blunkett selected the incisive contribution of Oswald Mosley – yes, that Sir Oswald – to the economic crisis in 1930, before he went off the political rails. Lloyd George spoke next, followed by several ex-current-and future PMs. Those were the days!  Alastair Campbell has offered up the late John Smith, always a witty, lawyerly speaker, in an economic attack on John Major's government in 1993, a year before his death. Dennis Skinner has picked one of his own speeches, a brilliant Friday morning filibuster designed to thwart opponents of stem cell research by talking for hours about a byelection writ. It was an important tactical manoeuvre at the time, now forgotten (and probably banned by "modernisation" reforms), so we forgive him the egocentricity.  There is melancholy as well as glory in these dusty digital pages, heroism and intrigue buried among the routine questions about sewage, country bypasses, colonies and war. The past, the issues and the orators, seems larger than the present.  It need not be; it may not be again. But no one currently operating in the Commons makes the cut; none of them probably made the longlist either. Alas, the comparisons are not comforting. Weighty debates today are few. The Commons chamber is not what it was.  • Official Report, Centenary Volume 1909-2009, Great Speeches from 100 Years, edited by Ian Church. The Stationary Office, £25.  Contents may be reproduced under click-use licence from the Office of Public Sector Information.
Michael White: Hansard's book of the greatest speeches of the past century chosen by the country's best known politicians includes both predictable and surprising choices. Read the best of the best here