Call me an adulterer. Take my millions . . . But get your paws off my DOG!
(Hurley ) Or how the real battle behind Ant’s divorce is who gets the labrador
OFALL the sensitive and tricky issues which can prove a s ticking point in a divorce, you will struggle to find one quite as appealing as Hurley the labrador. Chocolate brown, with soulful eyes and a loyal nature, he is the apple of Ant McPartlin’s eye.
Ant,42,saysthatthepoochiskeytohisc ontinuing recovery from drink and drug addictions. In 2017, before splitting from wife Lisa, he argued to have visits from the dog whileinresidentialrehab,eventhoughhecouldn’t see his wife.
His soon-to-be-ex-wife Lisa Armstrong, meanwhile, refers to Hurley as her ‘baby’ and her ‘baby boy’. Indeed, she’s so crazy about dogsthatthere is talk she will devote a-chunk of her expected multi-million pound divorce settlement to a dog charity.
Hurley came into their lives in 2013, as they struggled to conceive a child, and the joy he brought them seemed to help fill that void of longing to start a family.
Ant said just before getting the dog: ‘Lisa and I would love to have kids. We’re t rying. It’s tougher than you think when you get a bit older.’
Now that they are divorcing — a decree nisi was granted in the Central Family Court in London this week — the question of who gets to keep the dog has become the most c ontentious topic of all.
AfriendofLisa’ssays:‘Theyarefightingabout money and about a non-disclosure agreement which Ant’s team want her to sign and she is refusing. But most of all, it is about the dog. They cannot agree.
‘Both o f t hem w ill b e h eartbroken i f t hey lose H urley. H e h as s aid s he c an h ave a nything she wants — except for Hurley.’
At present, Ant and Lisa each have the dog for a week at a time, but no one is keen f or t his s hared c ustody a rrangement to continue.
The handovers are upsetting for both parties, and earlier this year they had a firecracker of a row over the phone about who should pick up Hurley at what time.
Things got so heated that Lisa’s father took the phone away from his daughter and bellowed at TV presenter Ant, telling him not to speak to his girl like that.
So how did this canine companion come t o o ccupy s uch a n i mportant p lace i n their hearts?
As is often the case when it comes to TV presenters A nt a nd D ec, t he d ecision t o g et a dog in the first place was down to one of them following the other. Dec went first, getting a miniature dachshund called Rocky. A few months later, Ant followed with Hurley.
He wanted to call him Apollo Creed, M r T o r D rago — a fter t he opponents of the boxerintheRocky films — but Lisa put her foot down and said that they should come up with a name themselves.
In a n i nterview A nt s aid: ‘ I l oved it from the off. We were doing the house training and I was thinking, “This is b **** y brilliant”, having them in our lives.
‘The thing about dogs is that they don’t care that you’re on the telly. Mine d oesn’t e ven w atch m e. I t ry t o make him but he’s not interested.’
When Ant and Dec took their S aturday Night Takeaway TV show on a n a rena t our i n 2 014, D ec’s t hengirlfriend Ali Astall (now his wife) and Ant’s wife Lisa kept them c ompany. A nd b oth w omen b rought along their beloved dogs.
In an interview in November 2014, Lisa said that when Ant went to present I ’m A C elebrity i n A ustralia, the d og w ould m iss h im t erribly a nd she would have to try not to say his name as ‘Hurley starts to whimper and thinks he’s at the door’.
Ant’s birthday falls in November, during the filming. Ant said: ‘The dog sent me a birthday card with big paw prints.’
In 2017, Ant went into residential rehab — the beginning of the end of his marriage. He had become addictedtoTramadolpainkillersafterakneeinjury,andhadbeenmixing pills with alcohol, which could have killed him.
In r ehab, h e w as c ompletely c ut o ff from the world.
He said: ‘For the first few weeks it’s complete radio silence. All you do is work. You look at all the literature, s it w ith t eams, t alk a bout your history, how you got to this-point, analyse yourself, why you want help and speak to the medical team. I t w as v ery h ard n ot s peaking to anyone because you worry if they’re doing all right.’
EVENTUALLY, Ant was allowed to break the isolation — with his dog. ‘They allowed him to come into rehab after I’d done a month working with the team,’ he said. ‘I missed him so much.
‘You’re not meant to see your spouse but I made quite an impassioned plea to get my dog in.
‘He stayed over for a couple of nights a nd l ifted e verybody’s s pirits. The f ollowing m onth w as m ore p lain sailing after that.’
Ant came out of rehab in August and went straight up to Newcastle to see his family. He then went on holiday to LA, without Lisa, and spent a period of time in Australia filming I’m A Celebrity.
A few weeks after he returned, he quietly set up home in a rented pad near to the marital house he’d shared with Lisa in West London. His mother ,61- year-old ChristineWood hall , moved in , too.
Then, in January this year, after months of speculation about the marriage failing — all denied by Lisa — Ant released a statement saying that the marriage was over.
Lisa apparently refused to put her name to it, and so it ran :‘ Antis very sad to announce that, after 11 years, he is ending his marriage to Lisa McPartlin.’
THe 41-year-old had supported him unstintingly while he was in rehab, c ontinued to wear her wedding ring and angrily denied that they were ‘estranged’.
She even sent a legal warning to those newspapers which had said that the marriage was over shortly before the announcement.
A friend said: ‘She hero-worships him and doesn’t want anyone else.’
The explanation given by Ant’s camp was that he needed to cut the cord for the sake of his health. One of his friends told me that he felt ‘horribly guilty’ about leaving Lisa.
In the months that followed, no progress was made at all towards a divorce, as for a prolonged period Lisa resisted even hiring a lawyer. She also reportedly declined to send her jewellery in for valuation.
As w eeks t urned i nto m onths, A nt grew increasingly frustrated that he was still no closer to formally ending the marriage.
All that changed when Ant’s romance with his PA, Anne-Marie Corbett, was revealed in June.
Lisa twee ted bitterly :‘ And to think she was MY friend!’ She added: ‘My friend and our PA who I let into our home.’
Apparently Lisa had suspected that a romance was developing back in March when she saw in a picture that Anne-Marie had p rovided Ant with a packed lunch. Her intuition told her that the employee-boss relationship was g etting a little closer than it ought.
A few weeks later, Anne-Marie s upported Ant when he went to a police s tation a fter h is d rink-driving crash in South-West London on Sunday, March 18, and was on the team who went with him to court.
Her own marriage to husband Scott broke up in October last year and she and Ant have since been pictured looking bliss fully happy on
a holiday together in Florence, and on a shopping trip to Harrods with her two children.
As you might expect, the presence of a new woman has meant that the divorce started to gather speed. Ant is particularly keen to wipe the slate clean with Lisa and start again with Anne-Marie, whose smiling face is now the screen saver on his mobile phone.
Will he marry her — and finally start a family as his great pal Dec has? A friend of his said: ‘He’s not the most stable and sensible person, so nothing would surprise me. He does seem to be one of those men who needs to go straight from one marriage into another.’
There are persistent rumours that 42-year-old Ms Corbett is already expecting, which would surely be a dagger blow to Lisa after their problems in conceiving. Whatever happens, Lisa, who is head of make-up and hair on BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, can certainly expect a big payout.
She and Ant got together when they were both 19 years old, and were married in the summer of 2006. He is reportedly worth £62 million.
Once the divorce is settled, Lisa could probably — should she wish — retire in comfort. Progress was made towards a settlement in August, after Lisa returned from a holiday in Los Angeles.
Ant at first wanted to say Lisa’s unreasonable behaviour had caused the end of the marriage — while Lisa had initially thought that she would cite Ant’s unreasonable behaviour in being addicted to pills as the reason for marital breakdown.
In short, both were apparently very angry about perceived ‘bad behaviour’ on the other side, and both felt that the other was to blame for the toxic state into which the marriage descended.
But in August, Ant agreed that Lisa could cite his unreasonable behaviour as adultery with Anne-Marie.
A friend of Ant’s says that was a measure of his ‘desperation’ to get the divorce over and done with.
His PR team have made it clear that the adultery refers to the period after he and Lisa had announced their separation.
An insider said: ‘Ant admitted adultery as his relationship with Anne-Marie began when they were still married — although they were separated at the time.
‘He was happy to admit to that to try to bring a quick resolution to everything and draw a line under it all. It’s all been very upsetting for all parties and he just wants to move on.’
No final financial settlement has yet been reached, though.
Lisa remains in the £4 million former marital home in Chiswick, West London, which has a Banksy on its walls, and Ant has apparently said he’s happy for her to stay there if she wants to.
It was reported this week that he has bought a £5 million mansion in South-West London, which he will renovate as part of his recovery.
HOWeveR, the fact that the home she shared with her husband is two doors down from his Tv partner Dec might mean that Lisa chooses to move out.
The next step is for Lisa to apply for a decree absolute, which she will be able to do once all financial and other matters are settled — including the fate of Hurley.
There is still a lot of bitterness, and Lisa is apparently being ‘very stubborn’ about what she wants.
A measure of how sour things are came when her friend Craig Young, a fellow bandmate from Lisa’s time with Nineties pop group Deuce, wrote in July that Ant should go back to rehab.
He said: ‘I do believe drugs and alcohol addiction is an illness but it’s not an excuse for such utter disregard for good humans.
‘Go back to rehab, lose the enablers, the cheaters and a*** lickers. Take responsibility for your actions. Once you have done the work . . . in a few years you might come to realise the pain you have caused and the irreparable wounds that can’t heal, and you will no doubt be full of remorse. But something tells me it might be too late.’
Lisa has not commented, but liked Twitter comments from friends telling her ‘good things come to kind people’ and ‘pull on your big girls pants, it’s your turn to start afresh’.
A friend said: ‘Lisa is really struggling. Her friends are advising her to move on, but that is easier said than done.
‘Some of her friends are not a great influence, and they get together and have a drink and then she starts liking all these really bitter things which get said on Twitter about Ant.
‘She needs to not be on social media. She feels that she has been cast aside very unfairly, and she can’t believe how all of their friends have dumped her and all the rest of it.
‘She is a very sad girl and it is a sad situation.
‘I saw her recently and she has got such baggy eyes, like she had been crying. It is still a battle between them and that is exhausting. And she worries about the dog all the time.’