There’s something, I think, very heartening and touching in reading Andrew Lloyd Webber talk about joining Alcoholics Anonymous at the ripe old age of 78. He told the Sunday Times’s Melissa Denes: “I am a recovering alcoholic. Sixteen months ago I decided that I needed help and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.” He waxes lyrical about his delight in going to AA meetings every day.

There may be some grumbling in AA circles about Lord L-W’s candour

There may be some grumbling in AA circles about Lord L-W’s candour

Bloody good on him. Especially given that most people who nurse a lifelong addiction find it very hard to recover by the time they are approaching their eighties – if they stay alive that long in the first place. There may be some grumbling in AA circles about Lord L-W’s candour – the group’s traditions encourage you to keep membership private, for lots of sensible reasons – but I tend to think that he will do more good than harm in this regard. Besides, the age in which we live is not one that the authors of the Big Book could well have anticipated.

For those who still nurture the idea that you have to be a park-bench drinker to count as an alcoholic, for instance, it can only be helpful to have the example of an AA newcomer with a downstairs loo full of Tony Awards, squillions in the bank and a cellar full of £50,000 cases of Chateau Petrus now needing to be disposed of.

For Chateau Petrus or no, Lord Lloyd-Webber’s trajectory, to those of us who’ve had a brush with the stuff ourselves, is piercingly familiar. He realised he was losing a grip on his........

© The Spectator