The support group groupies have issued another ban. They have attempted to slap an exclusion order on another long-standing member, in addition to the one they have meted out to my friend, the bricklayer.

This latest victim hasn’t been to a meeting in Surrey for seven years because the last time he went, the local area committee accused him of something so Orwellian it was impossible for him to do anything other than leave.

They accused him of believing in God too much. During a ridiculous row over whether members should be forced to applaud the giving out of sobriety chips, this fellow wouldn’t back down in his belief that they should not be forced, because where was God in that sort of regime? A bigwig since made chairman duly staged a vote making it compulsory to clap, then when the member next refused, by way of protest, he threw him out that very evening and told him not to come back.

Oh, they trumped up some bogus allegation that he had given advice on medication – the cardinal sin – in order to really frighten everybody, but he absolutely had not. They are fitting people up.

My friend, the bricklayer, was banned for having criminal convictions, a fact that definitely ought not to exclude him. They cannot even claim this other member is a safety risk as he has an exemplary record.

What is clearly happening is that a small clique of busybodies have become drunk on the power they have wrongly assigned themselves. They ought not to be doing anything other than serving the dozens of support group meetings in their area by performing certain organisational duties.

But a few of them have taken it upon themselves to run the meetings according to their own aims, which appear highly questionable.

They seem to want only the sorts of alcoholic they personally approve of in ‘their’ meetings, which goes against every aim this organisation has to be open to all – ‘the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking’.

I suspect they don’t want the sorts of men who can and do stand up to them. But I also detect another factor common to the bricklayer and the guy who refused to clap.

Both share unashamedly about God. So do I. Although this cornerstone of the programme is optional for those who don’t want it, many members do. But there is a curious strain of hard-line secularism in the fellowship now, as in society generally.

Certain atheists do not wish simply to be included. They seek to eradicate faith, converting those who believe to their way of non-belief.

And so this man of faith turned up at a Surrey meeting after seven years, and received an official text from the ‘region rep’ warning him that if he wants to come again, he must prove he has ‘changed’. It was a long, incredibly pompous letter, astounding in its cheek.

The region rep claimed he had a duty of care to ‘safeguard’ newcomers, the inference being, from zealots who believed in things unseen.

I clearly remember this region rep, years ago, aggressively tackling me for mentioning the G-word. He cross shared after me and told the room I misspoke.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago and the same guy is slamming the door of a meeting room in my back as I leave during a row in which one of the groupies has stuck her iPhone in my face and filmed me sitting next to the bricklayer as the groupies shouted at him to leave.

While some have spoken out, many members appear complicit, perhaps for fear that they, too, will be excluded.

I wrote to the only thing that counts as a head office, the General Service Board. But the general secretary said the board could not intervene because of the unique structure: the board serves the local branches, or intergroups, and the intergroups serve the meetings.

Therefore, if an intergroup subverts the structure to run the meetings instead of serving them, there is nothing the board can do except by also breaching the structure. And they won’t do that. It’s Catch-22.

A small group of individuals are free to turn away my friend the bricklayer, and whoever else they take a dislike to, and by doing so they trash the reputation of a nearly 100-year-old institution beloved throughout the world.

But I do wonder. I read that a group in New York went so rogue that the American head office stopped them advertising their meetings on the official website. They became unaffiliated.

So the mechanism does exist to tackle self-promoting cults that spring up every now and again, masquerading as the real deal, but being nothing of the sort.