The Government members in the House of Representatives have been offered a reprieve. If they are sensible, they will grasp it - firmly. With both hands.

For, as we have argued before in these columns, the censure motion against Opposition member Karl Samuda - brought by Parliament's bothersome peddler of schoolboy antics, Donald Buchanan - ought never to have been seriously entertained in the first place. It should have been treated as an exasperated, but tolerant teacher would have dealt with the pranks that one of the naughty boys might have got up to in the William books which, we suppose, Mr. Buchanan read as a child.

Unfortunately, Mr. Buchanan appeared to have taken himself seriously. And so, it seems, did the Parliament, sensing they might have caught out one of the opposing gang, who would get his own back.

The problem facing the government is that this censure of Mr. Samuda was much ado about little; transparently so, to boot.

The fact that Mr. Samuda claimed that Mr. Hylton's document on the Sandals Whitehouse was a report might have been imprecise in nomenclature. But it is hardly likely that anyone will ever claim that Mr. Hylton prepared the document.

Mr. Samuda's statement that the document was sent to former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson is only slightly more problematic and could have been easily clarified by the Government side.

We suspect that having been asked by Mr. Patterson to use his good offices to find consensus, and a settlement, between the protagonists in the Sandals Whitehouse affair, Mr. Hylton, after initial discussions, prepared a paper on what he believed to have been broad areas of agreement. Gorstew, the private sector partners in the hotel, and the Urban Development Corporation and the National Investment Bank of Jamaica (NIBJ), would then comment on Mr. Hylton's understanding of their reasons and, therefore, the sharing of liabilities, for the cost overrun on the project. It is this document that fell, or was made to fall, in Mr. Samuda's hands.

The Government expected that people would have been overly exercised by the charade of its censure motion, except that they were upstaged by the scandal over the political 'gift' to the ruling party by the Dutch company Trafigura Beheer. The Government did, in fact, limp through a one-sided debate which concluded with the censure of Mr. Samuda and the decision to ask the House committee on privileges to determine his punishment.

However, the strong and, to many, persuasive argument by Opposition Leader Bruce Golding, that in the absence of the claim of a specific infraction against Mr. Samuda on which the committee should rule, the censure was of itself the punishment. The committee, in a fudge, has sent the matter back to the House for clarification of the infraction.

That, hopefully, will be the end of the matter. Government members should discreetly allow it to slide from the Order Paper and quietly drift into oblivion. For, their action was not only an overkill, but embarrassing nonsense in the first place.

Yet, to have the matter resurface would be good politics for the JLP. And perhaps another opportunity to show nimbleness on the part of the Opposition and the intellectual rigor mortis displayed by the Government's committee members on Wednesday.