The North Somerset Conservative Association has been put into special measures, after a year which saw it lose the constituency to Labour and end up in financial conflicts within the Conservative Party.

The local party of Liam Fox’s former constituency was left “without having the resources to effectively run any future election campaigns,” the chair of the association Nigel Ashton said in an email to local party members informing them of the situation on December 30.

The organisation is now in “supported status” and will be partly run directly by the central Conservative Party for a period. Mr Ashton wrote: “I realise that some will not be happy with the outcome but we can no longer be in constant conflict with the party we all chose to join.”

The news came as a shock to many in the local party, with one party member describing it as a “bolt from the blue.”

Despite two requests to Mr Ashton to hold a meeting of the council’s executive in the months before the news, local party members said they had received no response and no meeting had happened.

He said: “Going into supported status is going to help us financially. […] What we are actually going through is a positive.”

Party vesting rules mean that the assets of each association need to be redistributed according to the changes to each constituency, meaning the North Somerset Conservative Association has to give just under 9% of its assets to the new Wells and Mendip Hills Conservative Association — but North Somerset’s assets are not cash, but its headquarters on Nailsea High Street.

Mr Ashton said: “If —as in North Somerset’s case — you own a building, how do we pay 8.974% to our neighbouring association who now owns that, when we don’t have any cash? […] It was felt we needed to take out a mortgage on the building or take out a loan on the building so that we can settle our bills, rather than sharing a building which is nowhere near Wells.”

The need to settle the vesting arrangements happened at the same time as the association pulled out of a “grouping” of pooled resources with the other Conservative associations in Somerset, which Mr Ashton warned would leave it without the resources to run campaigns “nor to realistically fund its ongoing commitments to the group.”

The Conservative Party has now given the North Somerset Conservative Association an interest-free loan to settle its debts, alongside putting it in supported status. Existing members of its executive council, who were elected to their positions last year, have now been “stood down” by the party— except for Mr Ashton, Felicity Baker, and Andrew Farnden. They have been retained as part of a new executive council along with regional party figures to run the association while it is in supported status.

Mt Ashton said: “It’s just really bad timing with the general election and the boundary changes and all that sort of stuff going on at the same time.”