An opera singer, a former lads’ magazine editor and a senior civil servant who resigned from his job just 48 hours ago have been unveiled as candidates for Nigel Farage’s Brexit party in the European elections.

Martin Daubney, a former editor of Loaded magazine and regular TV pundit, said it was the “hardest day of my life” as he was named as the party’s candidate for the West Midlands in the elections, set for 23 May.

He appeared alongside James Wells, who quit his job as the UK head of trade at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Tuesday so he could stand for the party in Wales. “It’s a big risk. I’ve not taken the decision lightly,” he told supporters at the Hilton hotel in Manchester. “I believe in Brexit and more importantly … all this nonsense about people didn’t know what they were voting for is garbage.”

Wells, who said he had resigned his Conservative party membership last week, said he had worked for the ONS for six years, right up until 4pm on Wednesday. “I can no longer watch democratic values being ripped up,” he said.

Daubney, 48, is best known as the longest-serving editor of Loaded and as a regular pundit on Sky News and Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff. He has remarked on his time at Loaded with a mix of pride and shame, admitting he had a “haunting sense of regret” for turning a generation of young men on to pornography.

He once described the “intellectual low-mark” of his time at Loaded as conducting a “nipple count” of the number of bare breasts in its pages. “To our dismay, we’d been trumped by Maxim,” he wrote.

Daubney, who also co-founded a men’s rights campaign, once led a “straight pride” march through London to protest against heterosexuality being “undermined and unfashionable”.

Announcing his candidacy on Thursday, he said he was “not one of the Farage disciples” and thought he was “born Labour and would die Labour”. “We are doing something quite bizarre,” he said. “We are basically turkeys voting for Christmas [but] we have such convictions that those are odds we’re prepared to play with.”

Lucy Harris, an opera singer and pro-Brexit activist, was announced as the party’s candidate for Yorkshire. Harris claimed ordinary Brexit supporters had been “marginalised and vilified” and were even being denied job opportunities because of their voting preference. “That is truly damaging to the fabric of our democracy,” she said.

Lucy Harris announces her candidacy on Thursday. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

Louis Stedman-Bryce, 44, a property investor, said he was “sick and tired” of what he described as the media’s portrayal of leave voters as “white, homophobic, we’re definitely racist and we didn’t know what we voted for”.

“I stand before you as a gay, black man and I can definitely tell you I know what I was voting for when I voted for Brexit,” he said to cheers and applause.

Henrik Overgaard-Nielsen, 59, a Danish-born NHS dentist who moved to Britain in 1996, was announced as the party’s candidate for North West England, alongside Elizabeth Babade, a Nigerian-born lawyer who is the daughter of two judges.

The six names unveiled in Manchester join the likes of Annunziata Rees-Mogg, the sister of the senior Tory backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Conservative minister Ann Widdicombe, and Claire Fox, a former member of the Revolutionary Communist party, as Brexit party candidates for the EU elections.

The party claims to have signed up more than 60,000 supporters and more than 175,000 online followers, and to have raised more than £750,000 in under a month.