It’s Budget Day and while even the Beeb’s news site is struggling to keep up with the server load, I find myself in something of an ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ mood… so I thought I’d top of my recent run of posts on the Tories and all thing web 2.0 by cast around for a bit more info on young Rohan Silva, Gideon George Osborne’s economic advisor and – according to this Grauniad piece on Osborne’s inheritance tax announcement at last year’s Tory conference, an ‘Ex-Treasury ‘Golden Boy’.

Quite how ‘golden’ Silva actually is remains to be seen as, six months on, Osborne’s ‘big idea’ on inheritance tax and non-Doms is already looking a lot like living on a very brief past ‘glory’ after he – and his team – turned out to be such an effective bunch of ‘heavyweights’ on Northern Rock that Vince Cable became the MSM’s favourite ‘go-to guy’ whenever a bit of credible opposition commentary was required to the extent that it became difficult to visualise Cable without imagining a ‘Mini-Me’ version of Osborne sticking out his jacket pocket after the fashion of the Spitting Image Owen/Steel puppet combo.

Golden may be his reputation as an economist – he appears to have studied at the LSE, interned with a Labour MP, Nigel Griffiths and worked a stint at the Treasury before hooking up with Peevish George – jeebus, but don’t his whiny voice grate on you? – but the paucity of on-line trace material on Silva casts him firmly in the mold of a total n00b when it comes to understanding and commenting on t’internet.

Put simply, there is next to bugger all about the guy – not even – it appears – the almost ubiquitous Facebook or MySpace profile you’d expect from someone employed by the Tories supposed ‘Mr Web 2.0’, although what I did manage to track down is quite interesting, like this two year old find by Recess Monkey:

George Osborne is obviously too busy counting his inheritance to write a response to today’s budget, so has requested that one of his minions send out the following e-mail, asking others to contribute:

As in previous years, the Shadow Chancellor is seeking expert views and analysis of the Budget announcement. We would very much welcome your views both during, and after, the Budget.

In order to feed in your comments, please email them to this address (rohan_silva@hotmail.com) or call or text 07966478586.

These views will be used to help formulate our response to the Budget, and may also be cited by Conservative front bench spokesmen and women. However, if you would prefer your comments not to be disseminated more widely, please let us know when you submit your comments.

Obviously any comments you submit during the Budget announcement will be based only on Brown’s speech; a fuller analysis can usually only take place after reading relevant sections of the Budget report. However, please don’t hesitate to send over any thoughts during the speech itself – they will be treated very much as a first impression of the Budget, but will be extremely helpful nonetheless.

If you have any questions, or require further information, please do not hesitate to contact me.

I look forward to receiving your comments on Wednesday.

Kind regards,

Rohan

Rohan Silva
Economic Adviser
Office of the Shadow Chancellor
020 7219 1236

So what you’re saying here, Rohan, is that your ‘heavyweight’ boss and his ‘golden’ team of advisers can’t even manage to put up a response the Budget without having shill, by e-mail, for material from other people – although, interestingly, if you read Osborne’s contribution to the Budget debate to which this e-mail relates, it looks very much as if the only new material Silva’s email might have elicited was this ‘economic gem’:

The Chancellor should at least tell Labour councillors what he is up to. This weekend, after the Budget speech, the leader of the Labour group on Lambeth council wrote to a Mr. Patrick McLoughlin of Kennington Park Road, London. A copy of the letter has mysteriously fallen into my hands. It comes with a glossy leaflet—it is interesting that the Prime Minister’s picture does not appear on such leaflets any more. Under the heading “What will Labour do?” it states:

“We will:

Press the Government to provide more help for pensioners to pay their council tax bills.”

No doubt the leaflets are being pulped as we speak. Labour says one thing in the Chamber and another thing outside.

The more observant among you might note that there’s a major difference between a Labour councillor promising to press a Labour government for more help for pensioners – a perfectly reasonable thing to do – and a claim that the government will provide such help, which the councillor doesn’t make and which they would be in no position to promise without such a claim being authorised by party HQ.

And the moral of this story is..?

Nothing more than that councillors fighting local elections under local conditions may easily disagree with a policy of their national party, in or out of government, which doesn’t suit local conditions – in short ‘Bears DO shit in the woods”.

That said, its not that much of return on an e-mail shill and just about everything Osborne put in that speech either referenced points raised by other MPs or came straight from the MSM and/or a a think-tank or two.

For all that Osborne puts up any ‘expert views and analysis’ he might just as easily have read out loud the content of the FT’s analysis from the day after the actual speech and added ‘me too’ at the end of it.

After this first mention in dispatches, Silva had to wait a little under 12 months or so before turning up on the public radar, this time having been copied in to emails, which were leaked to Channel 4, which showed that 18 months after becoming Shadow Chancellor, Osborne still hadn’t to got to grips with the demands of preventing his front bench colleagues from writing cheques he wouldn’t be able to cash while in search of cheap headline:

From: HANCOCK, Matthew [Osbournes’ chief of staff]

Sent: 25 February 2007 09:45:35

To: OSBORNE, George; Rohan Silva; HANCOCK, Matthew; HARRISON, Rupert; SILVA, Rohan
Subject: Re: Labour in opposition – controlling spending commitments

We do have a system of sorts – which we are improving…. [Labour] will always be able to put together a dodgy dossier of ‘commitments’ – which will include all sorts of things like housing. And I doubt they will stop including it in their briefing to broadcasters when George is on. We need to be in a position to rebut.

Twelve months ago they had ‘a system of sorts’ which they claimed to be improving – C4 were reporting at the time that Osborne was insisting that any statements committing a future Tory government to any new or increased expenditure would have to be cleared through him.

So, a year or so on, has Osborne’s system actually improved any further?

A Conservative administration would increase health spending by up to an extra £28 billion a year, a leading moderniser has told The Times. Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, gave a long-term commitment that under the Tories health spending will rise to take up an extra 2 per cent of GDP.

“I think we are bound to have rising real-terms health expenditure,” he said. “That means that health expenditure is going to be a rising proportion of total public expenditure.”

It is the most explicit pledge to increase spending on the NHS since David Cameron became Tory leader and take the party into territory beyond current Labour commitments. But Mr Lansley said that funding such increases would require cuts elsewhere in public services if the Conservatives were to meet their tax pledges.

So was this announcement, which drew a fair amount of flak from with Tory ranks, approved by Osborne or not?

Its impossible to say as Osborne’s thoughts are not incorporated into the article in question, although it does note that:

George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, has based his economic strategy on the Tories reducing, over time, government spending as a proportion of national wealth. Mr Lansley’s pledge means that a Tory government would have to find billions of pounds of cuts from other areas such as education, the police, transport and defence.

…which could be construed as suggesting otherwise.

Oh, and Silva’s contribution to this email exchange:

From: Rohan Silva [Osbourne aid]

Sent: 25 February 2007 00:04
To: OSBORNE, George; HANCOCK, Matthew; HARRISON, Rupert; SILVA, Rohan
Subject: Labour in opposition – controlling spending commitments

[Gordon Brown primarily relied on the force of his personality as well as leaks, threats, counter-briefings and pre-emptive policy announcements to maintain spending discipline amongst colleagues.]

You may not be too keen on some of the methods, but its fair to say that as Chancellor, Brown did actually have a grip on things that Osborne appears still to lack.

And that’s about it – Rohan seems to average one appearance on the public radar about every 12 months, and this seem to be it for this year, so I guess we’ll next be seeing him sometime in the spring of 2009 for his next annual e-mail boner.