A Daily Mail journalist was ejected from an Irish embassy reception in London after heckling the ambassador with shouts of “boring” and “Brexit”.

Joanna Bell, who also writes for the London Evening Standard, was escorted from the premises after interrupting a speech by the Irish ambassador to the UK, Adrian O’Neill, on Monday, it has emerged.

A Brexiter, Bell said she took offence at the diplomat’s reference to a possible second referendum and shouted her interjections across a room filled with British politicians and officials including the chancellor, Philip Hammond, and Jeffrey Archer.

After several outbursts she was asked to leave the embassy’s “politics and press” party, part of Westminster’s Christmas social calendar.

Guests at the reception made clear that the ambassador had never said that the British “should” hold a second referendum, but rather had made a humorous remark linking it to a Rolling Stones song.

O’Neill started his speech with a few jokes which picked up on the attorney general Geoffrey Cox’s Rolling Stones references when he did the warm up to Theresa May’s appearance at this year’s Tory party conference.

When he got to the serious business to make a point about a “hard border”, a voice shot up from the back of the room shouting “bor-ing”.

Bell’s heckling stunned guests which included the Northern Ireland secretary Karen Bradley, the chancellor Philip Hammond, former cabinet minister Michael Fallon, the head of the Northern Ireland Office Jonathan Stevens and Lord Archer and his wife Mary.

When contacted by the Guardian at Associated Newspapers on Wednesday, Bell declined to comment on the grounds that she was writing about the incident in an article for the Spectator magazine.

In the Spectator article, she claimed her taunting of the ambassador “was all meant to be in good jest”. However, witnesses said her heckling during the serious points being made about the fragility of the institutions of peace created by the Good Friday Agreement was far from humorous and had interrupted a hushed respectful atmosphere in the ballroom of the embassy.

Bell is from a village in County Louth near the Republic’s border with Northern Ireland, and has described herself as a former remainer who embraced Brexit because of the European commission’s “contemptible” treatment of Britain since the vote to leave the EU.

In an interview with the Irish Times on Tuesday, Bell said the ambassador’s mention of a possible second referendum prompted her heckling.

“A second referendum would have highly unfortunate consequences for this polarised and still combustible island. It’s not that mandates should never be withdrawn or a referendum reconsidered. If, however, a democratic outcome is to be reconsidered, it must first be respected. What could be more damaging than a second referendum if remain wins as narrowly as it lost the first? We would find ourselves in a precarious state.”

She added: “Obviously, I profoundly regret the excessive robustness and perhaps lack of finesse with which I expressed my disagreement with the ambassador. I had, I confess, enjoyed a good lunch with an eccentric aristocrat who is a staunch Brexiteer.”

Bell said she worked as a customs guard on the Northern Ireland border in 2006 before emigrating and becoming a journalist. She writes mainly about lifestyle, fashion and travel.

In an Evening Standard comment piece on dating last year the journalist expressed admiration for the Tory Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg. “I wonder if Jacob Rees-Mogg is popular these days because he reminds people of the good old days when men acted like gentlemen and women were treated with respect.”