The public has been told repeatedly that John Healey is so concerned about budget leaks that he has set up defence-style “compartmentalisation” to prevent the Treasury’s financial secrets escaping.

The macho military analogies began in mid-August when Healey was said by the Telegraph to be “on a war footing” to stop the drip of information that he believed had beleaguered Rachel Reeves.

The Financial Times added that “military-style protocols” were being deployed, while the Spectator was excited about the use of “classified computer systems” and the i newspaper described a process where officials could sign in to only their parts of the document and could not access the sections they were not working on.

This weekend, the Observer reported that Healey was “flabbergasted” by the lack of security around financial information when he became chancellor and “it was so different to how we did things in the MoD”.

The chancellor is known to have been worried that market-sensitive leaks cost Britain billions in…