Unlike his predecessor, Max Hastings, he was also in more or less perfect alignment with the thinking of his proprietor, Lord Black. While not quite a sine qua non for the job, the ability to see things from the proprietor's view undoubtedly helps at the Telegraph, which takes a strong and undeviating line on certain subjects: the US (good), Europe/EU (bad), the BBC (bad), Israel (good), devolution (bad) and hunting (good). The fact that the rest of the country -- and not all its readership either -- may not see things in quite such black-and-white terms seems to matter little.
Unlike Hastings, who was more of a journalists' editor -- hands-on, engaged with the toil and turmoil of putting a daily paper out -- Moore gave the impression of being a leader writers' editor: more interested in the nuances of the leaders and the op ed columns than in the splash story or the lead on the City pages. While this gave the paper a sense of soul and intellectual purpose, it also made for lively reading -- even if it was only to disagree with the views expressed within.
But the rest of the paper seemed to be allowed to go its own way. As a reader, this was exemplified by a Telegraph headline a few years ago on a page lead story about the mid-Channel collision of two ships. "How could this happen?" wailed the headline. To which the reader could have only one response: "I don't know. That's why I buy a newspaper. So they can explain it to me." It's hard to imagine the same happening on any other broadsheet.
In the end, if Moore is remembered for one thing, it will be for steering the good ship Telegraph when its sales fell below the critical 1m level. As an epitaph that's pretty grim, but it suggests that he failed in what most would regard as the critical task facing any Telegraph editor: to bring in new readers without losing the old (apart from the ones who succumbed to mortality anyway, of which the Telegraph has more than any other paper).
Under Moore, the Telegraph did at least try to modernise and feminise itself -- those being the most obvious barriers to picking up new readers -- but, to this reader at least, without any obvious conviction. Sure, it tried to wear more youthful, feminist clothes, signing columnists like Irvine Welsh and Anne Robinson -- but its heart never seemed to be in it. Other innovations, such as the daily separate sports section, seemed to happen despite, rather than because of him.
More aggressive modernisation and innovation must be the key aim of the new editor, Martin Newland, about whom little is known other than that he was news editor of the paper until 1998, after which he worked for Lord Black in Canada. The fact that he is not from the obvious list of insider candidates suggests that the paper's management recognises that continuity of the Moore era isn't an option, but that something fresh is needed.
Dominic Mills is editorial director of Haymarket Business Publishing. He wrote a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph on advertising and marketing from 1995 to 2003.