The United Kingdom’s Harold Wilson, in his second period as British Prime Minister, was in Ottawa on this day in 1975 for talks with Canada’s Pierre Trudeau.As any political history fan knows, our British friends are masters at keeping diaries. In Ottawa with Wilson was his senior policy advisor, Bernard Donoughue, who turned out to be a diary keeper. Donoughue described PM Wilson's visit to Ottawa in his Downing Street Diary: With Harold Wilson in No.10, which was published in 2016.“When we landed (in Ottawa) it was pitch black, cold and snow everywhere,” he wrote of their arrival on January 28. “There were Canadian officials, a mass of press men with flashing lights, and then we were whipped off in a great long cavalcade of enormous cars. Ottawa seemed quite pretty, very spacious, with the houses snuggled under deep snow. Very nice were the thousands of skaters on the frozen canal that runs right through the city. We went direct to the High Commission, a very stately house (Earnscliffe, once the home of Sir John A. Macdonald) …. Prime Minister Trudeau dropped in to say hello. Curiously lined face. But slim young figure and moves very lithely.”The next morning, Wilson and Trudeau had their full meetings. Donoughue seems to have been very impressed with the officials and Trudeau's political staff he encountered, even learning something valuable from the Canadians.“At 10 o’clock he (Wilson) set off for the official talks. I was picked up by Gordon Smith of the Canadian Cabinet Office and went in to his office to meet a bright Trudeau aide – Mike Kirby …. We had a very good talk …. Returned 11:30 and we had a briefing for HW and (James) Callaghan before their talks with Trudeau. Then off we all went in cavalcade. I was taken to an officials’ lunch in a large official dining room. Rather boring. Though I sat next to Trudeau’s political secretary, Bob Murdoch, and we discussed our job problems. He said that their civil servants were not allowed near anything to do with appointments, travel arrangements, seating, etc. This was all controlled by the political aides. ‘The key to politics is access; you must control access,’ he said. This is a change which must come in England. After lunch I went to the Trudeau residence, which was a nice detached house near where I was staying at Rideau Gate. The prime ministerial lunch was still going on when I arrived so I sat in a side-room and waited. I could hear the buzz of conversation, and especially the light drone of Trudeau’s voice from the dining-room.”“After a while Bob Murdoch arrived. He took a telephone call and told me there was a two-hour delay on the plane out (to Washington) because of snow and freezing rain. I told HW when they emerged from lunch. ‘Don’t tell the officials,’ he said, ‘or they will fit something else in.’”Shortly after, Wilson (and Donoughue) departed Canada’s capital for the flight south for talks with the new U.S. President, Gerald Ford.Donoughue, who later enter the House of Lords and serve as a junior minister under Tony Blair, described his impressions of Trudeau after the latter visited Wilson and the UK the following year. “Trudeau was very impressive,” he wrote on March 12, 1975, “quick, sharp, perceptive, and often very amusing. The people around him were good too. They give an impression that Canada is really going places.”Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.