Written by Larisa Brown, Defence Editor - The Times.
In Stuart Anderson's darkest days, the blade he pierced into the wooden door frame was a reminder of his “failure” to kill himself, he says, adding he has never told anyone what went through his head those nights spent in his garage.
He would drink a litre of vodka — enough to make himself sick — and sit with the lights turned out, contemplating slashing his wrists while his wife and children were sleeping inside the house.
“Every night for weeks I would look at the blade and think tonight is the night. And I would battle that,” he says. There is no mincing his words.
Twelve years on, the former rifleman in the Royal Green Jackets is now a Conservative MP, sitting in the Houses of Parliament’s Portcullis House café wearing a smart navy blue suit and sipping a pumpkin spiced latte. He has been teetotal for eight years.
He is speaking days after General Sir Patrick Sanders, who is currently commander of Strategic Command and served with Anderson in the 2nd Battalion, revealed how his battlefield experiences in Iraq had left him suicidal and drinking alone at 2am.
Anderson’s journey from the cathedral city of Hereford to Westminster is an unconventional one compared with many of his political colleagues.
When he was eight his father, Samuel, died from a brain tumour that was triggered by skin cancer blamed on his time spent in the sun deployed overseas.
Samuel had served as a corporal in the 22 Special Air Service Regiment (22 SAS) for 12 years, going on tours to Northern Ireland, Borneo and Oman before he returned to the UK and met the future MP’s mother, Leslie, who was an army nurse. He is buried at the SAS graveyard at St Martin’s Church in Hereford.
Anderson’s school was at the edge of the graveyard, and his house was at the other side. It meant he had to walk past his father’s grave every day to go to school. “You don't really understand the impact of that at the time,” Anderson, now 44, says, but it is something that has stayed with him ever since.
His mother was left on her own to raise Anderson and his two brothers.
They attended one of the worst schools in Herefordshire and Anderson left school at 16 with no GCSES. “When I collected my results my teacher handed them to me, looked and laughed. He said, ‘Anderson, you’ll never make anything of your life.’ From that point on I was determined to prove him wrong.”
He helped out in a carpet shop for the first few months after leaving and then decided to sign up to the army. His dream was to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the SAS. At the end of his Phase 2 training — which prepared him to go into the Royal Green Jackets — he came top of the class and was awarded a silver tankard inscribed with “best student”, which still sits on his desk at his home in Wolverhampton.
It was all going well until eight months into his service, when he had turned 17, and he was accidentally shot in a training exercise during a live firing attack. The bullet from an SA80 fired at point blank range shattered his foot. “What was left was a clump of bone fragments and shrapnel, nothing like a working foot,” he says, getting out a picture on his phone showing the corner of his foot blown out.
Over the coming months he had several major operations to save his foot and lower leg but was told it would have to be amputated.
“The surgeon said, ‘You will never walk again without the aid of a walking stick. Your military career is over,’ ” Anderson says. He was left feeling “worthless” to the army and his mother ended up contacting the SAS Regimental Association, a charity that had been a big help to the family since his father died. They offered to rehabilitate him themselves and after ten months he returned to full active service.
“I did two months’ pre-deployment training and then I was straight onto the streets of Northern Ireland during the Troubles,” he says. “There was no follow-up or support, nothing.”
He was deployed to west Belfast in 1996 — a particularly violent year after the IRA broke its ceasefire with a bomb in the London Docklands. He describes it as a “world of hatred and violence”. Soon afterwards he became one of the youngest lance corporals in the division. He was told he had a promising career ahead of him and was sent to Germany, where his life started to go downhill.
There was a heavy drinking culture because alcohol was cheap, costing the equivalent of 1p for a shot of neat vodka in the mess. The more he drank, the more aggressive he became, and he would get into fights for no reason, eventually leading to his demotion.
“The more I got hurt, the more I almost got addicted to it because it was a release of pain. I was screaming out for help,” he says. He had his nose broken a number of times, as well as his ribs and all but one of his ten fingers. He still has a misshapen knuckle to show for it.
After a six-month peacekeeping tour in Bosnia, he was promoted again from a rifleman to lance corporal by his commanding officer, a young General Sir Nick Carter, now the chief of the defence staff.
“He said to me, ‘You have had a bad year, let’s put it behind you. Everybody deserves a second chance.’ ”
In 1999, he got married in a local church in Hereford to Sarah, a hairdresser whom he met in a bar in Hereford, and with whom he has five children: Ella, 20, Samuel, 16, Harry, 12, Grace, 5, and Willow, 1.
Before Ella was born, Anderson decided to give the gruelling SAS selection course a try but while in the jungle, just two weeks before the end, he decided to withdraw and quit the army altogether.
He hit rock bottom in 2009, at the age of 33, after working as a bodyguard for VIPs overseas. The anger had built up over the years and he became distant with his family, leading to him and his wife separating for a short time.
“I would sit in the garage with the light off, just drinking, because that would numb out the pain,” he says. “I could drink a litre of vodka in the evening. Vodka was the easiest thing because it made you feel sick.
“I used to wake up in the morning and my first thought was one of such sadness because I hadn’t died in my sleep. I was pushing my body to the limit of abuse, and I wanted it just to die.
“This didn’t happen so I took a blade to cut my wrists open. I remember one night telling myself I could do it, and then I thought of my children. It was hard growing up without my dad and I didn’t want my kids to have to do the same,” he says.
He says he felt like a “huge failure” not being able to get the “courage” to die. He had no idea where to go for help and never told anyone about his mental health issues. It wasn’t until he decided to go to church that he started to get better.
He eventually stopped drinking and in 2016 decided he wanted to become an MP so he could stop others suffering like he had.
He bought a book, Politics for Dummies, decided he was a Conservative, and that year became a local councillor in Hereford.
He became the MP for Wolverhampton South West at the last election in December 2019 and sits on the defence select committee scrutinising the work of the government on defence issues.
“Something niggled in my mind that I had to use this experience for good,” he says. He thinks a lot has improved since he served, but he is now pushing the government to do more to help military personnel suffering from mental health issues.
“I want to keep raising that awareness and making people believe they have value and their life matters, and there is someone there to help,” he says.
For information on Samaritans, go to www.samaritans.org. To contact, call free on 116 123
Stuart has curated a support page for veterans. You can access it here.