I've been through hell, people have always assumed I couldn't have kids: Lisa ... trends now
Whenever the birthdays of her personal assistant’s two daughters came round, Lisa Armstrong would buy them lavish presents. She’d do the same at Christmas, too.
It was Lisa’s way of thanking the girls’ mother Anne-Marie Corbett for the work she did looking after her and her husband Ant McPartlin.
She always took great pleasure in picking out the gifts for Poppy and Daisy who are two years apart and were at primary school at the time.
‘Lisa would send Anne-Marie’s girls Christmas and birthday presents every year,’ says a close friend.
Ant McPartlin cradles his new son in a photo on Instagram in which he also displayed his family tree tattoo featuring the names of his wife and her two daughters
‘She enjoyed doing it. She also showered Anne-Marie with presents and even took her on holiday. Lisa and Anne-Marie were really good friends, she was a trusted part of the set-up.
How things have changed. For this is, of course, the very same Anne-Marie who in 2021 married Britain’s Got Talent presenter Ant after his acrimonious divorce from Lisa. And who on Tuesday morning gave birth to Ant’s first child — a boy named Wilder Patrick.
The TV favourite shared the news with his millions of Instagram followers, releasing an arty black-and-white photograph of him cuddling the child in which he showed off a tattoo on his shoulder of a tree with Anne-Marie’s nickname, ‘Amzie’, as well as Poppy and Daisy’s names inked into it. The girls, who are now teenagers and refer to Ant as ‘Dad’, have a younger brother.
Alongside the picture of the newborn, the star wrote on the joint Instagram account he shares with sidekick Declan Donnelly: ‘Welcome to the family,’ adding that the little boy was born at 8.54am on Tuesday.
Ant then wrote: ‘Baby is beautiful, Mummy’s a legend, sisters are over the moon. Dad’s a mess!’
The post must have cut poor Lisa to the quick. Because for her, the birth of little Wilder at the London Clinic was a painful reminder of how she remains childless at the age of 47 — and it devastates her.
As another friend of Lisa’s told me: ‘It is a tragedy. She missed her chance to have a baby and now she has to see Ant flaunting that tattoo on social media. He really didn’t need to do that.
‘It feels like he was rubbing her face in it. You have to remember we are talking about a story of great sadness here, she gave Ant everything and at the end of it all, ended up with an empty crib. It’s utterly heartbreaking.’
Pregnant Anne-Marie Corbett and Ant on a date night in central London last month
To make matters worse, Lisa — the head make-up artist on BBC show Strictly Come Dancing — found out that Anne-Marie was pregnant only after reading about it in the Mail.
For a time she was in denial.
‘Lisa finds it hurtful and heartbreaking that after everything he put her through, Ant didn’t give her the heads-up that he was going to be a dad,’ said the friend.
‘It all feels very insulting. Ant had Lisa’s best years. It feels like the ultimate betrayal. On top of that, you have all of their old pals congratulating Anne-Marie and Ant on social media.’
The good wishes flooded in from showbusiness friends including Davina McCall, This Morning’s Cat Deeley, Britain’s Got Talent judge Alesha Dixon, Jamie Redknapp and many more.
Adding further to the poignancy is the fact that when they were happy together, Ant made no secret of the fact that he and Lisa were desperate to have children and spent years trying to conceive.
Speaking in 2013 — seven years after the couple married — he was remarkably candid on the matter: ‘There’s a rumour that we do everything together and I’m holding off having kids till Dec finds himself Mrs Right.
‘I love that idea, but I’m afraid it’s not true. Lisa and I would love to have kids. We’re trying. It’s tougher than you think when you get a bit older. We’ve been trying for a little while so fingers crossed.’
No matter how many fingers both Lisa and Ant crossed, their dream of becoming parents wasn’t to be, even though they spent 23 years together.
And to add insult to injury, social media trolls started to blame her for being unable to have children. ‘She went through so much trying to have a baby, and then she had to put up with people guessing about her ability to have children,’ says one friend who insists Lisa did not have fertility problems.
Inevitably, it all seemed so different when she started dating Ant back in 1994 when her new beau was just 18.
They met on the music circuit. At the time Lisa was in a band called Deuce, while Ant and Dec were carving out careers as a pop duo known as PJ and Duncan — their characters from the Nineties children’s hit series Byker Grove, in which they first appeared on
