Foreign affairs advisers remain decisive players: Donald Macintyre examines the role of a key group of civil servants

BY 1984 Margaret Thatcher had a foreign affairs private secretary who rapidly acquired an influence which went far beyond his official rank.

Sir Charles Powell, a former FCO man, went spectacularly native at No 10, so much so that despite his charm and ability he became not only, in some periods, the most important Thatcher adviser - insofar as she took advice - but also a feared bete noire in the FCO. Today, the system has become more traditional and less frictional, on the whole. It is boring, but true, that John Major's most important foreign policymaker is Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Secretary.

Roderic Lyne, 46, a keen cyclist who also smokes, has a lower profile than Sir Charles in the same job, and is more of an executor than a policymaker. But he has a similar workrate and has impeccable credentials as a Foreign Office high-flyer - with extensive UN and extensive Russian experience. He has had a pivotal role over the last year in Anglo-Irish policy. Christopher Meyer, the Prime Minister's Press Secretary also happens to be a premier league foreign policy professional. Dominic Morris, the EU member of the Policy Unit, is sometimes credited in Whitehall with some of Mr Major's more robust language in speeches.

But most of the overall policy of 'variable geometry', which the speech reflects, evolved in the FCO itself - much more freely than it would have done in the Thatcher/Powell years. Michael Jay, 48, the FCO's Economic Director whose clarity of thought and articulacy was much on show in the TV series True Brits, is the senior London-based official on Western Europe. Anthony Carey, responsible for EU internal affairs, is a former head of Sir Leon Brittan's Cabinet in Brussels.

In Brussels, there is Sir John Kerr, 52, Mr Jay's chain-smoking predecessor in the Thatcher years, United Kingdom ambassador to the EU, and acknowledged master of the diplomatic black arts, and Nigel Scheinwald, another European high flyer in his team, ironically a school friend and contemporary of Michael Portillo, the Cabinet's most Euro- sceptic member.

'It just isn't true that these people are sentimental Europhiliacs,' one insider says. 'They know the daft side of Europe as well as anybody, and they are too sophisticated to fall into that trap.'

Pauline Neville Jones, the Foreign Office's political director, is a key figure in the development of Common Foreign and Security Policy, two 'pillars' of inter-governmental co-operation emphasised by Mr Major on Wednesday. But her main present - and grim - preoccupation is Bosnia.

But Mr Hurd also has political help to complement his own acute antennae: the new, upwardly mobile Minister of State for Europe is David Davis, 45, from the Euro-sceptic wing of the party, who distinguished himself as the European whip during the Maastricht Bill.

And on the political side, Mr Hurd has two special advisers, Michael Maclay, 42, - an ex-diplomat - at the UN during the Falklands War for example - journalist, and just happens to have written - in 1992 - a Chatham House pamphlet with the title Multi Speed Europe? the Community Beyond Maastricht, and Maurice Fraser, a 34 year old former Conservative Central Office a key author of the European manifesto - along with Anthony Teasdale, the Tory MEPs' representative in London.

But it is Mr Hurd himself who has wrestled with the task of finding a coherent policy which can also unite his party. Mr Major's language and interpretation is often his own. But it was Mr Hurd who, in a series of speeches, first floated the concept of a 'multi- speed' Europe which Mr Major used in the euro-election campaign. The term had changed by the time Mr Major got to Leiden. But most of the ideas had not.