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Out the Windows. For ten hours, on a sweltering summer day, his Ministers sat in their shirtsleeves and waited, talking, doodling, wandering about, leaning out of the windows of their second-story meeting room in Salisbury's Milton Building. To a man, they felt that Wilson had never intended to compromise, and had only been leading them on. His message was finally delivered by British High Commissioner John Baines Johnston, who spent 50 minutes alone with Smith and left grim-faced.
Shortly before midnight, Johnston telephoned Wilson to report that Smith had just taken the last step before independence: he had forced British Governor Sir Humphrey Gibbs to sign over his powers to the Cabinet in case he could "no longer function." Wilson decided that the only hope left was to phone Smith directly. He booked the call for 5 a.m., argued with the Rhodesian Prime Minister for 16 minutes, at one point politely told him he was being influenced by "thugs." It was all to no avail. "I was speaking to a confused and unhappy man," Wilson told the House of Commons. "He has been under intolerable pressures from some of his unreasoning extremists of the Rhodesian Front. I told him I thought they wanted their heads examined, or they must have a death wish on them."
Punitive Purpose. Wilson quickly made it clear that Britain intended to grant their death wish, but as painlessly for the rest of Rhodesia as possible. Noting scornfully that their declaration had "borrowed, for the purpose of small and frightened men, words of one of the historic documents of human freedom," he charged Smith and his cronies with treason, a crime that is punishable by death. He broke off all relations with the regime, kicked it out of the Commonwealth, and appealed to police, civil servants and soldiers to disobey their "illegal government."
More to the point, Wilson asked for an embargo on Rhodesia's vital tobacco exports and laid down economic sanctions designed to cut off most of its trade. But he rejected military intervention, unless a "legal government" asked for troops to restore order. "Our purpose is not punitive," Wilson said. "Our purpose is to restore a free government acting in the interests of the people of Rhodesia as a whole."
What Wilson had set out to do was to put just enough pressure on Rhodesia to topple the Smith regime but not enough to plunge the land into anarchy. It would not be an easy task. There was, for one thing, considerable doubt that Wilson's sanctions—or the parallel trade ban imposed by the U.S.—were strong enough to make Rhodesia feel more than a mild pinch, especially since prosperous South Africa would help Rhodesia make up any trade losses. But there was good reason for Wilson's stand. The blood ties between Britain and the white settlers of Rhodesia would make sterner measures highly unpopular.* And, as Wilson well knows, any recession in Rhodesia would hit the Africans harder than the whites. Smith has already threatened to deport 200,000 workers back to Malawai, a measure that would cripple Rhodesia's poverty-stricken neighbor, which depends heavily on their wages.