Disraeli's Tory administration in London does not want a war with the Zulus.

"The fact is," writes Sir Michael Hicks Beach, the colonial secretary in November 1878, "that matters in Eastern Europe and India... were so serious an aspect that we cannot have a Zulu war in addition to other greater and too possible troubles."

Sir Henry Bartle Frere, however, had been sent to the Cape Colony as governor and high commissioner in 1877 with the brief of creating a Confederation of South Africa from the various British colonies, Boer Republics and native states.

He concludes that the powerful Zulu kingdom stands in the way of this, and so is receptive to Sir Shepstone's arguments that King Cetshwayo and his Zulu army pose a challenge to the colonial powers’ peaceful occupation of the region.