Friendship sustains Conservative with extremely awful affliction (8)
I believe the answer is:
calamity
'affliction' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'friendship sustains conservative with extremely awful' is the wordplay.
'friendship' becomes 'amity' (I've seen this before).
'sustains' means one lot of letters go next to another.
'conservative' becomes 'c' (abbreviation commonly used in UK politics).
'with' means one lot of letters go next to another.
'extremely' suggests removing the centre.
'awful' with its middle removed is 'al'.
'c'+'al'='cal'
'amity' after 'cal' is 'CALAMITY'.
(Other definitions for calamity that I've seen before include "A sad or disastrous happening" , "Musical set in Deadwood" , "Disaster, extreme misfortune" , "Blow" , "Damaging event" .)