AA is turning away the very people who need it most

‘If AA wants to make its meetings safe, then maybe it should ban alcoholics,’ said the builder boyfriend and I had to admit, he had cracked it.

There was me getting all wound up about why more and more of the meetings in Surrey won’t let the bricklayer in because of his criminal convictions and a vaguely expressed malaise about his liking for the ladies, and it was actually quite simple.

In this new age of safeguarding, it’s clear that the only way you could make Alcoholics Anonymous into an organisation that passes muster for all the corporate compliance big charities either have to or want to do is by banning anyone with a drinking problem.

Because there is no one so potentially stir-fry crazy on a bad day, or, for that matter, so needy and hung up on the idea of romance than a recovering alky, which is why, nearly 100 years ago, AA founder Bill Wilson came up with the idea of bringing these tormented people together to share their common problem in a bid to stay off the booze.

These meetings work brilliantly – if you can get into them. The bricklayer has been banned from nine meetings in Surrey, and I wonder what Bill W. would make of it, not least because he was someone who struggled in sobriety with compulsiveness around romance, which appears to be a big part of what the organisers worry about.

The latest meeting to ban the bricklayer sent him a Dear John text after he went there on their invitation to be the main speaker. The secretary running this meeting was new to the area and unaware of the controversy. He assumed the bricklayer’s strong message and hard-knocks story would be something inspirational that people wanted to hear.