New questions have emerged over leaks of confidential UK diplomatic cables criticising Donald Trump after a 19-year-old Brexit activist was revealed to be the person who obtained them.

In a lengthy feature in the Mail on Sunday, Steven Edginton, who describes himself as a freelance journalist and who since April has worked for the Brexit party, said he was passed Sir Kim Darroch’s briefings on the White House.

The messages, sent from the Washington embassy to the Foreign Office, described Trump’s administration as “inept” and “utterly dysfunctional”.

Darroch resigned from his post after the president tweeted his fury at the comments, labelling Darroch a “pompous fool”. Foreign Office veterans, however, defended the ambassador’s cables as nothing more than the type of frank talk expected of diplomats.

Scotland Yard has launched an investigation into the leak to the Mail on Sunday and at one stage suggested editors could be prosecuted for publishing sensitive material.

In his account of the affair, Edginton admitted to believing he could be arrested for his role even though he was not “the leaker”. He said he had begun investigating this year how the civil service was preparing for Brexit.

“There had been repeated reports claiming that Europhile mandarins have been quietly working to thwart the result of the referendum,” he wrote. “I just wanted to discover the truth. This was not a Brexiteer plot to topple Sir Kim, nor was it some devilish scheme to torpedo the independence of the civil service by installing a political appointee in Washington. Instead, it was simply an honest journalistic endeavour.”

Edginton, who has vowed to protect the identity of his “trusted source”, said he spoke to serving and former civil servants to find out about their role during preparations for Brexit. He said he was passed a letter written by Darroch describing the White House as “inept”. He realised it was a significant story and contacted Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist under whose byline the Darroch story first appeared in the Mail on Sunday.

Edginton said: “I appreciate that my CV – and my pro-Brexit views – will inevitably fuel the conspiracy theories but I want to be absolutely clear: the leak of Sir Kim’s cables had absolutely nothing to do with the Brexit party.”

Edginton worked initially for the political website Westmonster, founded by the Brexit-backer Arron Banks, before periods as a digital strategist at the Taxpayers’ Alliance and Leave Means Leave campaign. Since April he has been employed by the Brexit party, organising its social media feeds.

In his Mail on Sunday article, Edginton said his name was left out of the original story to avoid “possible controversy”.

It was a big scoop for a young journalist with no formal training. Although it is not unusual for British tabloids to use the work of journalists without giving them a credit, it is unusual for the freelancer to out themselves at a later date.

Edginton said he had already provided stories on this basis to the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Sun’s website and the Mail on Sunday.

Edginton previously described Oakeshott as “one of the best journalists this country has to offer” after she ran a story in the Sunday Times about Banks’s links to the Russian embassy.

“I first contacted Isabel three years ago, when I was 16 and still at state school, asking if I could interview her for my YouTube channel,” he wrote this year, explaining that he had since accompanied her to many public appearances.



In another tweet, recently deleted, he described helping Oakeshott to prepare for a Question Time appearance in December 2017.

Having started an obscure politics YouTube channel while still a teenager, Edginton interviewed a number of prominent political figures and began adopting an increasingly pro-Brexit stance, which opened a number of doors.

Last summer, he turned down the offer of a place at the London School of Economics to continue working for Westmonster, the hyper-partisan online news outlet founded by Banks and Michael Heaver, a former spokesman for Nigel Farage and now a Brexit party MEP.

He then picked up a number of roles in quick succession, including a stint as digital campaign manager at the Taxpayers’ Alliance, and this year began work doing digital strategy work for Leave Means Leave. The pro-Brexit organisation was founded by the businessman Richard Tice.

After Tice co-founded the Brexit party with Farage to fight the EU elections, Edginton joined as head of digital campaigns, where he was one of the few individuals with access to the party’s Facebook page during the EU elections – helping to oversee a series of slick videos.