born 22 September 1980 | Royal Marines | Special Boat Service
In the Special Boat Service, the point man goes first. He is the first through the door of a Taliban compound, the first into the dark, the first into harm’s way — and the men behind him follow the path he has just made. For the last three years of his military career, that was Ant Middleton’s job. It was the final stage of a journey through three of the toughest branches of the British armed forces that had begun thirteen years earlier, when he joined the Army as a teenager: the airborne engineers of 9 Parachute Squadron, the Royal Marines of 40 Commando, and the SBS, the naval wing of United Kingdom Special Forces. Few soldiers have completed all three of the selection courses those units demand — P Company, the Commando Course and United Kingdom Special Forces Selection — a combination sometimes called the “holy trinity” of British elite forces. Middleton did, and then he did something rarer still: he carried that world onto television, becoming the face of SAS: Who Dares Wins and one of the best-known former soldiers in Britain. His later career, however, has been as contested as his service was admired, and any honest account of him has to hold both halves of the story.
Early life
Anthony Middleton was born in Portsmouth on 22 September 1980. His father died while he was still young, and after that loss he was brought up in rural France, a childhood that left him, by his own account, restless and determined to prove himself. He set his sights on the armed forces early, and he did not stop at the first door that opened to him. What followed was a career built on a refusal to settle: each time he reached the standard of one elite unit, he looked for a harder one.
He joined the British Army in 1998, at the age of seventeen, and was posted to 9 Parachute Squadron Royal Engineers, the airborne combat engineer unit of 16 Air Assault Brigade. The squadron’s soldiers are sappers first and paratroopers second: they must pass P Company, the Parachute Regiment’s selection course, with its marches, log races and stretcher carries, before they learn the engineer’s trade of demolitions, bridging and field fortifications under fire. Middleton served with the squadron for four years, deploying to Northern Ireland in 1999 during Operation Banner, the Army’s long campaign in the province, and to the Republic of North Macedonia in 2001 during Operation Essential Harvest, the NATO mission that collected weapons from ethnic Albanian insurgents after the country’s brief conflict. He left the Army in 2002, but he had not finished with military life. He had simply decided that the next challenge lay elsewhere.
Royal Marines and 40 Commando
After three years out of uniform, Middleton enlisted in the Royal Marines on 2 May 2005. He was twenty-four, older than most recruits, and he entered the thirty-two-week commando course at the Commando Training Centre Royal Marines in Lympstone, Devon — the longest basic infantry training course in NATO, ending in the four commando tests: the nine-mile speed march, the endurance course, the Tarzan assault course and the thirty-mile march across Dartmoor, all completed in succession. He passed out on 20 January 2006 with 898 Troop, winning the King’s Badge, awarded to the best all-round recruit in the troop. He was posted to D Company, 40 Commando, the Taunton-based commando unit that has served in every major British conflict since its formation in 1942.
His first tour of Afghanistan came in 2007, with 40 Commando in Helmand Province, at a time when British forces were fighting some of the hardest battles of the campaign against a determined Taliban enemy. It was his third operational tour, after Northern Ireland and Macedonia, and it confirmed the direction his career was taking. Within a year he had volunteered for the hardest selection of all.
Special Boat Service
In 2008 Middleton joined the Special Boat Service, the naval special forces unit and the sister unit of the Special Air Service, which together form United Kingdom Special Forces. Before he could join, he had to pass United Kingdom Special Forces Selection, the joint course run in the Brecon Beacons and the jungles of Brunei that breaks most candidates who attempt it. He completed the “holy trinity”: P Company, the Commando Course and Special Forces Selection — a combination achieved by only a handful of British servicemen.
Within the SBS he served as a point man and as a sniper, and he deployed on two further tours of Afghanistan, making three Afghan tours in all. The point man’s role is the most exposed in a special forces patrol: he leads a small team into a compound or a building, searching for high-value targets on dangerous “hard arrest” operations, knowing that any threat inside will meet him first. Middleton has described that work in his own published account, First Man In, in which he writes that the majority of people know him from television and assume he served in the SAS, when in fact he was an SBS operator. The details of most special forces operations remain classified, and this article does not attempt to reconstruct them; what is on the public record is the role itself, the two further tours, and the fact that he served in the SBS until he left the armed forces in 2011, having reached the rank of corporal.
His service record, as set out in the High Court in 2025, ran from 1998 to 2002 in the Army, and from 2005 to 2011 in the Royal Marines and United Kingdom Special Forces, with the SBS years running from 2008 to 2011 — ten years of service across a thirteen-year span. He left with no gallantry award on the public record and no published citation; his distinction was the path itself, through three of the most demanding units in the British armed forces, and the operational experience of three tours in Afghanistan.
Leaving the forces
On leaving the armed forces, Middleton worked first as a security guard for VIPs, and then as a security expert in South Africa and for various West African governments, training and advising presidential security teams. It was a common path for former special forces soldiers, and it kept him close to the world he knew. But the adjustment to civilian life was not smooth. In 2013, two years after leaving the SBS, he was convicted of the unlawful wounding of a male police officer and the common assault of a female police officer outside a nightclub in Chelmsford, Essex, and was sentenced to fourteen months’ imprisonment, of which he served four months. He has spoken candidly about the episode since, describing it as an alcohol-fuelled mistake that he has regretted ever since, and he writes about it at length in First Man In. His children were young at the time, and he has said the family told them he was away with the military.
Television: SAS: Who Dares Wins
Middleton’s second career began in 2015, when Channel 4 launched SAS: Who Dares Wins, a series in which civilian recruits are put through a version of special forces selection by a team of former special forces directing staff. Middleton was the chief instructor, the face of the show and its most recognisable voice, and he held the role for six series. The programme made him a household name, and it made the language of selection — the beasting, the interrogation, the fear bubble — part of everyday conversation. He also fronted the Australian version of the show for the Seven Network from 2020.
He used the platform to front other adventure series. In February 2017 he starred in Mutiny, captaining a crew of volunteers in a recreation of Captain William Bligh’s open-boat voyage across the Pacific after the mutiny on HMS Bounty in 1789. He presented the survival series Escape, and in 2018 he climbed Mount Everest for the series Extreme Everest with Ant Middleton, reaching the summit on 14 May 2018 with the climber Ed Wardle after a five-and-a-half-week ascent. In 2023 he climbed K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, completing the ascent of the two mountains that define modern mountaineering.
Books and the Volunteer Cadet Corps
Alongside television, Middleton became a prolific author. First Man In, published in 2018, was a number one Sunday Times bestseller, and it was followed by The Fear Bubble (2019), Zero Negativity (2020), Mental Fitness (2021) and Cold Justice (2022), with five of his books reaching the Sunday Times bestseller lists. A further book, Military Mindset, followed in 2024. The books mix memoir with the leadership and resilience lessons he drew from his service, and they have sold in large numbers to readers who never served but want to understand how special forces soldiers think under pressure.
He also kept a formal link with the armed forces. In November 2019 he was appointed chief cadet and honorary captain in the Royal Navy’s Volunteer Cadet Corps, the youth organisation sponsored by the Ministry of Defence. He left the role nine months later, in August 2020, after a controversial post on social media. He has also worked as an ambassador for SSAFA, the armed forces charity, accepting donations on its behalf and speaking for its work with veterans and their families.
A contested later record
Middleton’s later public life has been marked by controversy, and it is reported here briefly and on the record, without commentary. In March 2021 Channel 4 announced that he would not take part in future series of SAS: Who Dares Wins, saying after discussions about his personal conduct that its views and values were not aligned with his and that it would not work with him again. Middleton said at the time that it was his own decision to move on.
In March 2025 he and his wife Emilie were disqualified from acting as company directors for four years, after their company, Sway and Starting Limited, which managed income from his media work, failed to pay more than £1 million in tax — £869,351 in corporation tax and £384,518 in VAT — while nearly £3 million was withdrawn through a director’s loan account. The company went into liquidation in December 2022, and Middleton agreed to repay £300,000 in settlement of the loan. In October 2025 the Ministry of Defence began High Court proceedings against him, alleging that he had breached a confidentiality agreement signed on joining the special forces by disclosing information about United Kingdom Special Forces in a podcast published in July 2025. On 27 November 2025 Mr Justice Garnham granted an interim injunction restraining further disclosure; Middleton denied breaching the agreement and described the action as sudden, severe and disproportionate. In March 2026 the Ministry of Defence confirmed that the claim had been settled, and it was understood that Middleton had recommitted to complying with the agreement. He has also moved into politics, supporting Reform UK in 2024, speaking at the Unite the Kingdom rally in September 2025, and announcing an intention to stand as an independent candidate for Mayor of London in 2028.
Legacy
Ant Middleton’s military career stands on its own terms. Across a thirteen-year span from 1998 to 2011, he served in three units that each demand a different kind of toughness, and he reached the sharp end of the British armed forces as a point man and sniper in the Special Boat Service, on three tours of Afghanistan. The “holy trinity” of P Company, the Commando Course and Special Forces Selection is a rare achievement, and it is the foundation of everything that followed: the television career that brought special forces selection into millions of living rooms, the books that turned his experience into a language of resilience, and the climbs of Everest and K2 that tested the same qualities at altitude.
Yet his is also a career that shows how thin the line can be between the discipline of the military and the disorder of the life that follows it. The conviction in 2013, the loss of his Channel 4 role, the director disqualification and the High Court case are all part of the public record, and they sit alongside the service, not apart from it. That is the honest measure of the man: a soldier who went first through the door, who built a second career on the reputation of the first, and whose later years have tested that reputation in public. The service remains the core of the story, and it is the service that this article records.
Sources
- Ministry of Defence v Anthony Middleton, [2025] EWHC 3420 (KB), 27 November 2025 (service dates 1998–2002 and 2005–2011; UKSF 2008–2011; confidentiality agreement of 8 February 2008) — https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/ministry-of-defence-v-anthony-middleton-interim-order-for-an-injunction/
- UK Parliament, written answer, 4 September 2025 (appointment as Chief Cadet and Honorary Captain, Volunteer Cadet Corps, November 2019; ended nine months later) — https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2025-08-29/72329
- Ant Middleton, First Man In: Leading from the Front (HarperCollins, 2018) — service in 9 Parachute Squadron Royal Engineers, 40 Commando and the Special Boat Service; point man role; 2013 conviction
- Ant Middleton official website, “About” — https://antmiddleton.com/about
- The Daily Express, “Special forces hero turned TV star Ant Middleton on his action man past”, 17 June 2018 — https://d1dagyb1ctngx1.cloudfront.net/life-style/life/973747/sas-who-dares-wins-channel-4-ant-middleton-interview
- GoodTo, “Who is Ant Middleton and why did he get sent to prison?” — https://www.goodto.com/entertainment/entertainment-news/who-is-ant-middleton-and-why-did-he-get-sent-to-prison-655619
- Channel 4 / Hello Rayo, “Ant Middleton breaks silence after being ‘dropped’ by Channel 4”, 2 March 2021 — https://hellorayo.co.uk/lincs-fm/entertainment/celebrity/ant-middelton-axed-channel-4/
- Insolvency Service, via Business Live, “Ant Middleton banned after he and wife fail to pay £1m tax bill”, 24 March 2025 — https://www.business-live.co.uk/enterprise/ant-middleton-banned-after-wife-31266575.amp
- Ministry of Defence settles High Court legal claim against Ant Middleton, 8 March 2026 — https://www.perspectivemedia.com/ministry-of-defence-settles-high-court-legal-claim-against-ant-middleton
- Rangers Charity Foundation, “Ant Middleton accepts Armed Forces Cheque with Jamie Murphy”, 13 May 2019 (SSAFA ambassador) — https://www.rangerscharity.org.uk/news/ant-middleton-accepts-armed-forces-cheque-with-jamie-murphy/
- Images: File:During Exercise Albanian Lion the Royal Marines joined up with Albanian forces to practise their core amphibious fighting skills. MOD 45158631.jpg (UK Ministry of Defence, Open Government Licence v1.0) and File:Everest North Face toward Base Camp Tibet Luca Galuzzi 2006 edit 1.jpg (Luca Galuzzi, CC BY-SA 3.0) — Wikimedia Commons. Neither image depicts Middleton.
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