Breakaway Tory party launched by funeral tycoon

For a man who made his fortune burying the dead, inventing a new party for disaffected Tories should prove easy.

The People's Alliance, burst, or rather blinked, into the political limelight yesterday when it was launched in somewhat unconventional fashion on the internet at www.peoples-alliance.org.

Set up by Howard Hodgson, a funeral business tycoon, the party promises to allow 16-year-olds to become MPs and to give the public the right to vote on all new legislation.

It also proposes to issue smartcards to entitle people to vote and claim benefits, and to penalise petty crimes with a points system in the style of driving licences. Offenders would be docked of benefits and, if they accumulated enough points, be jailed.

Its leading figures include Jenny Ungless, Iain Duncan Smith's former chief of staff, Charlotte Kenyon, a former Central Office press officer, and Mark Adams, a former Downing Street official.

The party started as an internet site branded the New Party for Britain last year. Now it claims a rash of Tory defectors among its 30 members of staff, and up to 3,000 members. It hopes to field its first candidates in the Scottish Assembly elections in May.

Its launch, timed to coincide with the Tory spring conference in Harrogate, promises a written constitution as part of the "most substantial and startling reform" of the British constitution since 1707.

Its manifesto proposes setting up an English regional assembly, and splitting the role of MPs between Westminster and English, Scottish and Welsh parliaments. It also includes right-of-centre policies such as giving patients the right to state-funded private health care if they are not treated by the NHS in a reasonable time, and introducing a single rate of tax alongside a universal minimum income.

The manifesto said: "The key difference between the People's Alliance and any other party is our belief in the people. Once direct democracy is in place, the people will be able to vote down any new law proposed by the Government."

* Theresa May, the Conservative Party chairman, will make a fresh appeal for party unity today after weeks of turmoil over its leadership. She will urge party members at the spring conferenceto challenge "the false divisions that have built up in politics in this country and that have so bedevilled our chance to get things right."