‘Anti-establishment’ site is being edited by Nigel Farage’s former press officer and will mix aggregation and some original content

Arron Banks, the biggest financial backer of the campaign to leave the EU, has launched a website which will attempt to tap into the movement that led to the vote to leave.

The site’s editor and co-owner, Nigel Heaver, a former press adviser to Nigel Farage, said the site, called Westmonster, would funnel the different people who backed Brexit into one place using tactics learned from US sites Breitbart and the Drudge Report.

The site intends to harness the social media following built up by Banks’ Leave.EU campaign to rapidly build a large audience. The Leave.EU Facebook page has 800,000 likes and its Twitter account more than 115,000 followers. Heaver said both would begin sharing content primarily from Westmonster rather than established news outlets.

Heaver said: “The way we are looking at Brexit and Trump, it is outside of traditional party politics, it’s a focus on the movements. If you could get a news site that funnels that movement into one place it would be quite a powerful thing.”

The aim is to be one of the 10 most visited news sites in the UK within a year.

As well as adopting the aggregation model used by Drudge, which has become one of the largest drivers of news traffic on the web, Westmonster will also produce some original content, “written in way that is not politically correct, not the same news story you’ll read on every other website,” Heaver said.

The registered owners of the site are Heaver and Better for the Country Ltd, the company that ran Leave.EU and which is registered to the same address as Westmonster. Banks is not listed as a director, but Elizabeth Bilney, the chief executive of Leave.EU, is.

Early posts include a piece written by Farage arguing that the UK political establishment has not woken up to populist changes sweeping Europe, and a short post linking to a YouGov poll under the headline: “BRITS WANT THE BURKA BANNED!”.

Heaver said one of the ways the site would learn from Breitbart is in its coverage of the stories from Europe that people would otherwise not hear about on issues such as immigration. The German authorities have accused Breitbart of spreading fake news over false claims an immigrant mob attacked a German church.

Heaver said the problem of fake stories was not confined to the right, but that Westmonster would not run false information.

The brash and partisan model that Westmonster intends to follow has helped Breitbart become a powerful force in US media and politics. Its executive chairman, Stephen Bannon, has become Donald Trump’s chief strategist. The Drudge Report is also considered to have been hugely influential in Trump’s election win.

Banks is holding a party in Washington to celebrate Trump’s inauguration this week.

The Westmonster name was previously used by a short-lived politics blog set up by the publishing executive Lloyd Shepherd in 2007.