Hello,
This is a bit confusing, but I had/have a friend who is a bit of an intellectual bully, but overall she is great, and I get on well with her. She has always held senior positions, and is used to directing projects. Recently I asked her to work, voluntarily as I am doing, on a project that really needed her skills and political ability, however it was my project and it involved things close to me. As part of this, I was trying to bring in people with skills, and I asked someone else I know through her to join the project because this new person, (lets say Kate) a) had skills that suited and b) was out of work and needed to fill the gap on her CV.
All was going well, but the original friend (lets say Susan) also wanted to bring in Kate's husband on the project. Kate's husband works in Marketing, but frankly his ideas were rubbish, no ambition and poorly thought through, however, he clearly thought we were all amateurs and that he was throwing us tiny bones of experience - an attitude which annoyed me, but Susan, with her political 'ability' kept encouraging me to say his work was good even when it wasn't. Eventually I challenged him and said that he needed to come up with better ideas. He lost his rag and started going on about 'I do this for a living'. Susan then went into a big long lecture with me about how my personality was deficient, how I should apologise and how I needed to know my place - in front of Kate's husband!
I pointed out that she (Susan) had said nothing for ten minutes that wasn't insulting, she said 'you deserve it'. etc etc. When I reflected on the conversation I realised that throughout Susan had been interrupting me and basically undermining me, which added to the tension.
Later I made a decision (my project!) on a quick easy win campaign that had one specific goal but delaying by a day would mean that we wouldn't achieve its objective. Susan went mental! She insulted my work, then argued with me about it saying I had to let Kate's husband authorise it.. and that we should delay for two days for him to do so!
I told him that would defeat the purpose of doing it at all, and that in any case the decision had been made to go ahead.
This is where it got even weirder. We were in a coffee shop and another person working on the project arrived to meet me (say Joanne) - Susan then started saying 'Joanne agrees with me don't you' - Joanne knew nothing about it! . Then Susan started saying well now its two against one, what are you going to do? 
- I said as calmly as I could 'well there are 8 people on the project, you say there is 2, that's 2 to 6, unless you are assuming they are all on your side.
Anyway after that I got several emails from Kate's husband reminding me how long he had been working in marketing, how I should listen to him, how my attitude was wrong, and then.. get this.. an insistence on a further day's delay so his designer could redesign the campaign (but in a way that would undermine the message completely). This came as a 'you will do this' rather than a suggestion. I then get another email from Susan saying that I had to do what he suggested because I should be polite about her involvement.
I replied back saying that it was now too late as the purpose and timing meant that had I delayed I would have missed our opportunity, but had he lined up a designer that we could use for later campaigns?. The answer was 'no, I'm not here to organise a designer for you'
I then get another email back saying that he didn't understand what the project was anyway and could I send documents! I did and then I got a phonecall saying I should change my organisation's logo to a colour-scheme that matches his company logo!
I wrote back effectively saying that he was being unreasonable, he had attempted to control a project without even knowing what the project was and had promised resources that on request for them were not delivered and that this was difficult to manage.
He then calls Kate (who if you remember was the person whose skills I actually wanted in the first place) and gets her to pull out on his behalf, then calls Susan and asks her to do the same
I expect Susan to support me and stay with the project, but instead of doing this, she jumps in on their side, and completely withdraws from the project.
Suffice it to say, I have hardly spoken to Susan since, but I have noticed that several of the letters from people Susan was speaking to on behalf of us indicate that she had told a lot of people this was her project.
I feel bad because we got on well before this, but am I being unreasonable to cool off the friendship even though I could still use Susan's skills?
Susan knows me better than she knows Kate and Husband, so why did she jump in on their side first?