“Much of the confusion which attended the failure of the Talks on the Tiger in December last, and the subsequent rejection
by the Rhodesian Government of the terms of the draft memorandum for a settlement, was due to the attempt to deal in one
document with two quite separate problems: the principles of a new Constitution for Rhodesia, which, if accepted by the
Rhodesian Government, would be followed by action by the British Parliament to grant Rhodesia independence, and the arrangements
for the so-called return to legality, the ending of the rebellion. Neither would have presented insuperable difficulties had
they been kept separate and had the two Governments been prepared to trust each other. Because they were combined, Mr. Wilson was able to argue that Mr. Smith had himself accepted the substance of the memorandum, the constitutional provisions, but had subsequently been compelled by his unreasonable colleagues to reject
the whole because of their dislike of the procedure for ending the rebellion. And Mr. Smith, reluctant at first to say that
he could not trust Mr. Wilson to observe the spirit as well as the letter of the procedure for ending the rebellion was obliged to concentrate on what was, in fact, the real weakness of the Rhodesian position, the difficulty of finding some impartial
test of Rhodesian opinion as a whole which would produce a verdict in favour of independence prior to majority rule.”
