As I've said, Mike never lacked courage and was a great parliamentarian, but sometimes he could become so voluble that it was hard to work out what precisely he was arguing. Some of his former colleagues have told me of the lengthy and not always intelligible memos he would send to them when he was about to depart overseas as Minister for overseas trade, and many a reporter was left scratching his or her head after a Moore speech, trying to divine the meaning. The robustness of parliamentary debate certainly diminished when one of the House's more colourful figures—dare I say it, likeable rogues—departed to the WTO in 1999. 