Michael Howard's Conservatives face the prospect of distracting legal challenges by no less than two deselected general election candidates after a schoolteacher from Slough announced today that he would take action against the "little dictators" at Tory headquarters.

While the former deputy chairman of the party, Howard Flight, was deciding whether to challenge Mr Howard's decision to stop him running again as a Tory candidate, schoolteacher Adrian Hilton said he had been denied natural justice over a controversial magazine article written two years ago.

Mr Hilton, who teaches at a local grammar school, was selected by Slough Conservatives last month to replace their former candidate, Robert Oulds, who was deselected for posing in a photograph with knives and guns, including an AK-47 assault rifle. The party is hoping to overturn a 12,000-vote Labour majority in the town, which Labour has held since 1997.

Mr Hilton is listed in the 2005 Guinness Book of World Records for the fastest non-stop recitation of the complete works of Shakespeare, but the Tory leadership decided to remove him from the list of approved candidates after complaints about a Spectator article written in 2003 in which he portrayed the European Union as a papist plot to undo the Reformation and extend Vatican sovereignty over Britain.

This time around, the Slough association, already bruised over the departure of Mr Oulds, refused to play ball and voted instead to reaffirm Mr Hilton's candidacy.

The local party has now been put in "supported status" - which means that its officers are suspended and all decisions are made on its behalf by a representative from Conservative Central Office, which has imposed Sheila Gunn, John Major's former press secretary, as its new official candidate.

"All I can tell you is that the official candidate for Slough is a lady called Sheila Gunn. The association is now in 'supported status' which means that it is being managed and run by a [Conservative] board representative," a spokesman at Conservative Party headquarters said today.

But Mr Hilton said he had only learned of his deselection via the BBC website last night and constituency party officials had not been kept informed at all.

"These developments are causing me grave concern. There are people at Central Office behaving like little dictators and, seemingly, people who are ordinary members are being treated with contempt," he told the BBC's World at One programme. "I am simply appalled at the way the Slough Association has been treated."

Asked if he was giving up, Mr Hilton replied: "No I'm not. I am pursuing this in law because I do not feel that I, personally, have had natural justice.

"The party's treatment of the Slough Association is totally unacceptable. These are people who have been working their backsides off since 1997 to get an MP for Slough who is Conservative once again. Now they have been disbanded and they haven't even been told officially that they have been disbanded."

Mr Flight, a party deputy chairman, resigned from his post last week after The Times obtained a recording of comments made to a private Conservative meeting in which he said that the party was concealing the extent of planned spending cuts.

His supporters in West Sussex accepted that decision, but were were outraged when Mr Howard followed up by deselecting the MP. Among his backers are Baroness O'Cathain, the association's president, who has threatened to resign over the issue.

His fight to remain a Conservative MP suffered a setback today after a senior officer of his local constituency association confirmed that it was actively looking for another candidate to represent it at the forthcoming general election.

The comments from Russell Tanguay, agent for the Arundel & South Downs Conservative association, came as Mr Flight's lawyers examined the association's constitution to see whether the MP and former Tory deputy chairman could challenge a decision by the party leadership to deselect him.

"Howard Flight is ineligible to stand as a Conservative Party candidate," Mr Tanguay said. "The association is in the process of selecting a new candidate."

Mr Howard insisted today that his party's constitution was "very clear" in giving him power to sack Mr Flight as an election candidate. The Conservative leader sought to wrench the political battleground back on to the issue of immigration, but was again forced at a press conference to field questions about Mr Flight.

He said: "We have to act in accordance with the rules and constitution and the constitution is very clear. The fundamental point here is, this is about accountability and responsibility. We all have to be accountable for the things we say... We will not say one thing in private and another in public."

But Alan Milburn, the Labour campaign co-ordinator, took full advantage of the Conservative disarray, telling a Labour campaign press conference that Mr Flight's views were in reality shared by other leading Conservatives, including Mr Howard, Oliver Letwin, the Shadow Chancellor, and party co-chairmen Liam Fox and Lord Saatchi.

Referring to Mr Flight's comments on public spending under a Conservative government, Mr Milburn said: "What Mr Flight did was not a one-off. What Mr Flight believes is what Dr Fox believes, it is what Lord Saatchi believes, it is what Mr Letwin and, I believe, Mr Howard believes.

"They are all obsessively committed, ideologically committed to seeing through this Thatcherite agenda. "They don't believe that Mrs Thatcher went too far. They think that she didn't go far enough and that is why they have got to go well beyond what any Thatcherite revolution inflicted on this country."

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