Lockdown getting you down or family troubles? Straight-talking Ant Middleton’s here to help you beat your challenges
ANT Middleton smirks when I tell him his ethos in life reminds me of the catchy late-1990s hit Tubthumping.
The Chumbawamba song with the lyrics: “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you are never gonna keep me down.”
Ant, star of TV’s SAS: Who Dares Wins, yelps: “Yes! 100 per cent. That is exactly what life is all about.”
It’s been a challenging year for telly’s toughest man, yet none of it has knocked the irrepressible Ant off course.
The SBS veteran unashamedly wept after losing his mum to cancer in April, then his brother Michael was imprisoned.
Ant also had a bad case of social media foot in mouth.
He was forced to apologise after boasting of “cuddling fans at airports” during the pandemic and for comparing Black Lives Matter demos to those of the far Right.
Yet, while coming to terms with his own failings, Ant says he can only see the positives life has to offer.
The Special Forces hero — who has become a self-help guru thanks to a series of best-selling books — reveals: “No one’s perfect. Everyone has messed up, but you learn from it and move on.”
It’s this seemingly unquenchable life force that sees him eager to give advice to Sun readers going through difficult times. Our new Ask Ant series will see him offer lessons drawn from an imperfect life of searing highs and crushing lows.
From careers to family life, details of how to pose your question to [email protected] are below.
This is a man whose gilded military career of unimpeachable bravery and service was followed by a stretch behind bars for assault. A man who has conquered Everest but has been tripped up by social media.
“I self-reflect then bounce back,” the author of new book Zero Negativity: The Power Of Positive Thinking muses. “How are you going to solve other people’s problems if you can’t solve your own?
“It means I’m going to give people no-bulls**t answers.”
In April he lost his 62-year-old mum Diana to cancer. He reveals how hard her death hit him.
“It was tough,” he admitted. “It happened during lockdown. She had six children, only two of us were by her side when she passed away.
“The others weren’t allowed in the hospital. Two of our siblings were in France and one in Australia and they couldn’t get over. So that was the toughest bit.
“I remember just getting back home. My wife gave me a hug and I just had a little cry.
“And I’m not a crier but it was an emotional dump. I’m well-acquainted with death but it doesn’t mean I’m not emotional about it.
“But life is life, and we find a positive from it and move forward. That’s what I’ve done.”
It’s a principle Ant honed in his early years, having lost his father when he was just five years old.
His dad Peter, a computer programmer who played chess for Great Britain, had a fatal heart attack on New Year’s Eve 1985, aged just 36.
Straight-talking Ant, a married dad of five, now reflects: “It’s had more of an effect than I realised. You’re so adaptable — you forget things quickly as a child, don’t you?
“Well, you think you have and then it all comes back. But I take the positives from my father’s death. Would I be the man I am today if it hadn’t happened?”
When he was nine, Ant’s mum and his “bully” of a stepfather moved the family from Portsmouth to the village of Saint-Lo in France, which he calls an “over-whelming experience”.
He says: “I had to contend with the death of my father, moving to France and having to speak French, going to an all-Catholic school in a rural area with no English people there. I began to self-reflect and that has served me well in later life.
“I can break everything down, I can understand my emotions, I can understand who I am. I’m now very confident with who I am.
“I know the core of myself but I know that I’m forever a work in progress. It’s a message I want to pass on to others.”
Aged 15, Ant showed his emotional maturity by stopping his suicidal 17-year-old brother Daniel from jumping in front of a lorry.
Daniel had recently broken up with a girlfriend and was still upset at their father’s sudden death.
The author of three Sunday Times bestsellers believes the moment helped him to understand the importance of sharing a burden with someone else.
Ant — 5ft 8ins of tattooed muscle — says: “It stemmed from my father’s death and then Daniel split up with his girlfriend and went down quite a negative road.
“Perhaps I could have understood that better if we’d talked more and I could have stopped him getting to the point where he wanted to jump in front of a lorry.”
He added: “It’s the old cliché, which is that it helps to talk — and not everyone is a talker, right?
“But if you don’t talk about it, then how do you know that it’s not going to do you any good? So I’ll say to people, ‘Always talk’. ”
Ant’s stellar military career in some of the world’s toughest regiments — 9 Para, the Royal Marines, a sniper in the SBS — led to his role as chief instructor on Channel 4’s gruelling SAS: Who Dares Wins.
He said: “I went into the Army. Best recruit, got the maroon beret, my parachute wings. Then it was the Royal Marines, Special Forces, three tours of Afghanistan and I was like, ‘I’m bored with that’.
“I don’t get the point in doing something twice. How are you going to learn otherwise? I’d rather go and do something more extreme and a bit more out there, and learn a new side to me.”
Ant’s 15 years in the military — which included witnessing the bloodshed of Helmand Province, Afghanistan — has not left him haunted by his experiences.
“You know, I dream about war a lot,” he says. “But it’s not like I wake up and I’m in sweats.
“I loved my days in the military. Some people take their experiences harder and can’t deal with it. And some people lock it away and crack on. People say, ‘You’ve been so brave and heroic’, and I say, ‘I was just good at my job’.”
Ant’s low point came when he was jailed for a drunken altercation with two police officers outside an Essex nightclub in 2013. He was sentenced to 14 months for unlawfully wounding a male PC. Again, he took his prison experience as a positive.
“I’m certainly not proud of it by any means but that’s shaped me into who I am today,” he says.
“Going into prison, I realised that if I got any lower I would probably have been in that mental state of not wanting to be on the planet.
“I’ve never shied away from any of my problems. I’ve done wrong, that’s my punishment.
“I remember before I got transported to prison, thinking, ‘I need to be a model prisoner. I need to stay out of trouble and do everything in my power to get home to my wife and children’.
“When I mess up, I ask what I need to do to put it right. I’ve never shied away from that.
“So even though it’s one of the shameful experiences in my life, I’m grateful for the experience.
“I’ve plotted positives from every negative, and that was probably up there with the death of my father as a negative. But it’s done. You put your hand up and learn from it.”
Ant has also cut down on booze following his prison sentence.
The veteran added: “In a male-dominated organisation like the military, alcohol was part and parcel of survival. You had to go out and drink, you had to go out and fight. By default, I found I was good at fighting but s**t at drinking. I’ve never had a problem with alcohol. But when we went out, I didn’t have an off valve.
“Would I have ever punched a policeman if I wasn’t drunk? No.
“I made this conscious decision for about a year to cut alcohol out my life. And then I reintroduced it. So now you’ll never find me stumbling out the nightclub. I’ll have a couple then knock it on the head.
“It’s not fair on my children nor my wife, nor myself, to ever get in that state again.
“Again, it’s a learning curve. I’ve only learned that through tripping up and failing at it so many times.
“I’m 40 years old and I’ve learned a hell of a lot.”
Today, Ant says he could not be prouder of where he has ended up.
Got a problem? Ask Ant
Got a problem that only straight-talking advice will solve?
Ant Middleton will be answering Sun readers’ questions on everything . . . from relationships to jobs.
Email: [email protected] with your name and contact number and what you want to ask Britain’s most irrepressible man.
SAS: Who Dares Wins has gone global — an Australian version of the series he filmed is currently the number one entertainment show over there. And he has just finished filming a new Sky interview special Straight Talking, this time with Rebel Wilson in Mexico, which will air early next year. He smiles: “It’s amazing where life leads you if you stay positive.”
Ant says his message is especially important in the pandemic.
The hardman adds: “It’s a case of control — what you can control. We’re literally learning as we go.
“There’s a lot of people out there who look up to me for inspiration, look to me as a role model.
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“Everything is so negative now and I want to challenge that. My message is, ‘Stay positive and do what’s right by you and your family’. ”
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This seemingly unstoppable ball of energy is ready to enthuse Sun readers going through a tough time with the family, relationships or business problems. Ant adds: “I’m going to say, ‘Think about who you are, what you’re capable of’.
“Be honest with yourself, be open. And everything then lies in your grasp — it’s right there, no bulls**t.”
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