MR CHANNEL Tunnel has bowed out after nearly 30 years on the project. John Noulton retired at the end of December as Eurotunnel's director of public affairs.

Mr Noulton was more than a spin doctor, as 100 guests heard at his farewell celebration in Hythe Imperial Hotel, a venue with historic connections to the tunnel.

He had been a civil servant in the Ministry of Transport when the Wilson Government dropped the Channel Tunnel project in the early 1970s.

But the election of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives in 1979 revived the idea and Mr Noulton became involved in an Anglo-French study of a new fixed link.

Mrs Thatcher set up a select committee of MPs, chaired by the then Transport Minister David Mitchell, to examine the project.

John Noulton headed a committee that reported to the Mitchell Committee. And in 1986, Mr Mitchell convened a meeting at the Hythe Imperial Hotel, the first time a select committee had ever met outside the House of Commons. A plaque on the hotel entrance wall commemorates the occasion.

That was why Mr Noulton chose the hotel for his retirement party for friends and colleagues from both sides of the Channel, including his former boss David -- now Sir David - Mitchell.

Mr Noulton, who is also an expert on the aborted 19th century Channel Tunnel, later went on to work for tunnel builders TML before joining Eurotunnel and outspoken chief executive Sir Alastair Morton when the engineering was completed.

"In the early days of Eurotunnel, there were only three answers to any conceivable questions people asked," Mr Noulton said. "Three tunnels, Sir Alastair Morton, and Rabies."

He had to deal with the media frenzy following the devastating tunnel fire in the 1990s. A keen dog owner, he went on to help launch the popular Pet Travel scheme.

He said it was fashionable for the English and French to knock each other but both were intense rivals. He recalled what Lord Palmerston, then Prime Minister, had said when a French emissary first proposed the idea of a fixed link in the 1800s.

"What, what, you pretend to ask us to participate in a work the object of which is to shorten the distance we already consider short enough?"

Sir David said: "Hythe Imperial is a very special place in Channel Tunnel history and John is a very special person."

Even though she was Eurosceptic, Mrs Thatcher backed the Chunnel, Sir David said: "There's a lot of difference between interfering Brussels regulation and doing something that helps trade between Britain and France."

Richard Shirrefs, chief executive of Eurotunnel, paid tribute to Mr Noulton's "encyclopaedic" knowledge of the Channel Tunnel and his "supreme unflappability."

His knowledge of Government workings had come from "John and Yes Minister."

He added: "When John's grandchildren are old enough to ask him what did you do grandad, he will really be able to say: "I was one of the people who built the Channel Tunnel."