Andrew Rosindell had been tipped as a potential Reform recruit long before his defection from the Conservatives last weekend took Westminster by surprise.

Yet as he and Nigel Farage basked in the spotlight outside parliament on Monday, more than 200 miles away in the town of Whitby, North Yorkshire, a 15-year-old schoolboy was also savouring the moment.

Incredibly – at least to those unfamiliar with the rise of his burgeoning media enterprise – Charlie Simpson appeared to have scooped all other media by predicting on the evening before that the Essex MP would join Reform.

“EXCLUSIVE: MP Andrew Rosindell has reached an agreement to defect to Reform UK,” Charlie tweeted on Saturday, prompting derision from other users of X and pressure from Rosindell’s office to take down the tweet.

But the following day, Rosindell, who was a shadow Foreign Office minister under Kemi Badenoch, announced on X he had quit the Conservative party “with sorrow” after 25 years and had decided to join Reform “following a conversation with Nigel Farage earlier in the evening”.

A week on, Charlie’s reporting remains contested. While doffing their cap to the teenager, sources in Reform insist no conversation was taking place between Farage and Rosindell, who is understood to have been out canvassing with Tory activists in Essex when the tweet appeared.

Rather, it is claimed information was fed to Charlie to act as a catalyst for the defection in the knowledge that the Conservative leadership – already on alert after Robert Jenrick’s defection days earlier – would zero in on Rosindell, a known ally of the former Tory frontbencher. Charlie rejects this characterisation.

Charlie Simpson says he aims to ‘give an alternative to the mainstream media’ with an agenda to ‘push out rightwing news’. Photograph: Charlie Simpson

Whatever the truth, the events have massively boosted the profile of Charlie, part of a new generation of self-styled “independent journalists” with links to the far right.

“We have a clear agenda. It’s to give an alternative to the mainstream media, which is to push out rightwing news,” he told the Guardian.

Charlie has on at least one occasion been a speaker at a rally organised by the far-right activist known as Tommy Robinson. A former member of the UK Youth Parliament for Ashfield, he was embroiled in controversy in 2024 at his previous school in Nottinghamshire when he claimed to have been called a Nazi by a staff member, prompting the academy to launch an investigation. The school told GB News the incident was resolved in line with its policies.

In the same year, Charlie resigned from the youth parliament and set up @GBPolitics. The X account has 76,000 followers and bills itself as the “True Home of UK Political News”. It provides a mixture of posts about UK and international developments, sometimes crediting established journalists and others. Its profile has been boosted by retweets from figures including Elon Musk. A separate “personal account” in Charlie’s name is a mix of his “exclusives”, commentary, and sometimes just far-right slogans such as “mass deportations now”.

“I start work the second I get up at 6am,” Charlie said, adding that he begins reading the news and assigning tasks to a team of others who work with him on GB Politics. He goes to school, works again on his return, and finishes at 1am.

“The team will do the tweets, or get them ready, and I will have meetings with people. On my own personal account I do my own exclusives and we have launched a TikTok account, because people like it so much, but with the actual tweets we have a more ‘behind the scenes’ approach,” he said.

Charlie Simpson promises ‘a scoop in about two weeks’ over more Tory defections to Reform. Photograph: Charlie Simpson

Charlie says he regularly communicates with councillors and MPs, including members of the Labour party. From his own analytics, members of his readership are either very young or middle aged. About 40% are over 50 while 30% are under 18, he says.

Many are on the right, although Charlie’s relationship with Reform members is more complicated. “Going back to my personal account, I am blocked by many of Reform’s online base, who despise me but after the exclusive there have been people who apologised to me. I obviously have sources in the party,” he said.

While once a supporter of Farage, Charlie now describes him as a “fraud” who will never again get his support, and he has harsh words too for Lee Anderson, another of Reform’s MPs. He admires Rupert Lowe, viewing him as the potential saviour of the UK.

“Lee Anderson was my mentor and introduced me into politics but the second I was no longer needed he threw me under the bus,” Charlie said.

He names two other prominent Tory MPs – one of them Suella Braverman, who has previously refused to rule out joining Reform – who he says are in ongoing discussions about defecting to Reform, with three other backbenchers also involved.

“There will be a scoop in about two weeks,” Charlie said.