“You can’t say she is back … but she is coming back,” Sally Bedell Smith tells PEOPLE
Kate Middleton looked “pretty healthy” and “seemed happy” to return to public life for two back-to-back appearances over the weekend, royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith tells PEOPLE.
That said, the Princess of Wales’ appearances at Nov. 9’s Festival of Remembrance at Royal Albert Hall and Nov. 10’s Remembrance Sunday service at The Cenotaph doesn’t signal a full throttle return to royal duty — but it is promising.
“You can’t say she is back … but she is coming back,” Bedell Smith says, adding of Kate that “She is doing it in her own way and at her own pace, and carefully.”
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“I am sure she has missed participating and she seemed happy to be doing so,” she continues, adding, “I don’t think she has wanted to disappoint people, and even though they said weeks ago that she’d like to be there, it was only on Friday that they confirmed it.”
“She has managed the expectations of the public very well,” Bedell Smith adds.
Kate’s attendance was confirmed on Nov. 8 — as was the attendance of many other members of the royal family, including King Charles and Prince William — but Queen Camilla remained absent from public duty as she continues to recover from a chest infection, which the palace initially announced on Nov. 5.
“In the absence of the Queen, she [Kate] was even more the focal point,” Bedell Smith says.
Since announcing she had completed chemotherapy in a moving video message on Sept. 9, Bedell Smith says Kate has been “working at her various projects, and that’s not anything we can see.” As for remaining cancer free, “Now it is a case of monitoring and hoping she doesn’t have any more,” she adds.
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Kate, 42, has largely been absent from public life for the entirety of 2024, after abdominal surgery in January and, during her recovery from it, learning that cancer was detected. She told the world about her diagnosis on March 22 and has appeared publicly only a handful of times since, including at June 15’s Trooping the Colour, July 14 at Wimbledon, and on Oct. 10, when she accompanied Prince William to Southport, England to meet with families of victims of a mass stabbing attack there over the summer that killed three young girls. The two Remembrance appearances marked her first back-to-back public appearances all year.
“Being a senior member of the royal family and doing these ceremonial events is obviously important to her,” Bedell Smith tells PEOPLE.
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As her next appearance is expected to be her annual Christmas carol concert at Westminster Abbey in December, “She is clearly a vital piece of the royal family, really important both symbolically and in reality as a future Queen,” Bedell Smith says.
Of this weekend, “It was good that people saw her,” she adds.
