Moate was educated at Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith and was an insurance broker.[2] He first stood for Parliament for the Faversham constituency at the 1966 general election,[3] losing to Labour's Terence Boston. When the Redcliffe-Maud Report was campaigned against by rural district councils, Swale R.D.C. was forced to opt out of the campaign due to the similarity of "R.E. Mote" with its then-prospective candidate R. D. Moate.[4] By coincidence, Moate had moved the motion opposing Redcliffe-Maud at the Conservative Party conference.[5]
He was elected Member of Parliament for Faversham at the 1970 general election,[6] and served as MP until 1997. He was a member of the select committee on Agriculture from 1995 to 1997.[2]
Moate was a staunch Eurosceptic who had opposed Britain's entry into the European Economic Community in the early 1970s and who kept a 'roll of honour' of the 41 Conservative MPs who had voted against joining the EEC in 1971.[7] He was still hostile to the EEC in the early 1990s, becoming one of the 'Maastricht Rebels' who repeatedly voted against the Government's attempts to ratify the Maastricht Treaty.[7][8]
Moate was knighted in 1993 and lived in Newnham, near Sittingbourne, before moving to Faversham, where he died at home from cancer in April 2019, aged 80.[2] He was married twice and had three children.[10]
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