A man who interrupted a speech by Jacob Rees-Mogg at a conference was a Green Party councillor, The Argus can reveal.

The former business secretary was addressing the National Conservative conference in London when 72-year-old Dirk Campbell stormed the stage and grabbed the microphone from him.

He was forcibly removed from the stage by security after saying “I’d like to draw your attention to a few characteristics of fascism”.

Climate activist group Extinction Rebellion later claimed responsibility for disrupting the speech, as well as an address by Home Secretary Suella Braverman, condemning the “fascist ideologies of senior cabinet members and MPs”.

Mr Campbell serves as a Green Party councillor for Lewes Town Council and is a member of the environmental movement.

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Speaking to left-wing media organisation Novara Media, he said: “We are being asked to romanticise nationhood. That’s what a lot of the speeches were about.

“This is actually a core definition of fascism, and everything that follows from that is that we are asked to give up our individual self-determination in favour of the nation.

“I don’t like right-wing politics. I think it’s exclusive, and exclusivism leads to blaming, shaming, othering and scapegoating.”

Mr Campbell was the father of the first British woman to die fighting alongside Kurdish forces in Syria against the so-called Islamic State.

Among those attending the National Conservative conference included levelling up secretary Michael Gove, Tory MP for Ashfield Lee Anderson, commentator Toby Young and conservative historian David Starkey.

The National Conservative conference is funded by the US-based Edmund Burke Foundation.

The organisation supports “national independence and self-government”, opposes “liberal imperialism” and “uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration” and calls for a return to traditional family values. 

A spokeswoman for Lewes District Green Party said: “While this demonstration is not part of Dirk’s separate role as a Green Party councillor, we do sympathise with his understandable frustration at the current government’s alarming lurch into the kind of far-right politics that used to be reserved for dictator states, not proud democracies.”