On the evening of 2 June 2026, the Princess of Wales joined King Charles III and Queen Camilla at St James’s Palace for a reception marking the 125th anniversary of Cancer Research UK. It was the first time the King and the Princess had appeared together in public for a cancer charity, a cause that had become personal to both of them after they disclosed diagnoses within weeks of each other in early 2024. The King, patron of the charity, is still undergoing treatment. The Princess, who completed preventative chemotherapy in the autumn of 2024 and announced she was in remission in January 2025, was a late addition to the guest list.
The reception brought together researchers, clinicians, volunteers and partners whose work covers prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Immersive displays traced the charity’s record and the role of new technology in research. Lord Simon Stevens, chairman of Cancer Research UK, said more than a million lives had been saved from the disease in the UK since the mid-1980s, while noting that nearly one in two people will now develop cancer. High-profile supporters in the room included Davina McCall, Hannah Fry, Adele Roberts, and Ronan and Storm Keating.
The Princess arrived in a red Rodarte dress printed with white hearts, a colour and pattern she has long favoured, and spent the evening in conversation rather than on a platform. One exchange, overheard as she spoke with the singer Ronan Keating and his wife Storm, quickly travelled beyond the palace. Keating, whose mother Marie died of breast cancer in 1998, asked her to pass on his regards: “Please say hi to William.” Storm added that the Prince of Wales was “such a gent,” and Ronan followed with “Yeah, we love him.” The Princess, whose husband was not at the reception, laughed and answered, “So do I.”
It was a small remark, and it landed because it was unscripted. Fifteen years after their wedding at Westminster Abbey, Catherine and William have become more willing to let affection show in public, particularly since her illness. The line did not announce a new policy on royal emotion. It simply confirmed, in a crowded room, that the person everyone else was praising was the person she had chosen.
A second conversation carried more weight. Sebastian Bowen, widower of Dame Deborah James, told the Princess he had been thinking about the family a great deal. James, the broadcaster and campaigner known as Bowelbabe, was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2016 and died in 2022 at 40, after launching the Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK in the last weeks of her life. The Prince of Wales had visited her at home to present her damehood, and had spoken with the couple’s children. Bowen appeared to thank William for that sympathy. The Princess’s reply was brief: “He’s good like that.”
Bowen later said he had told her how moved his family had been by the support, given both privately and in public. The exchange did not dwell on grief. It recognised a kind of practical kindness that families remember after the cameras have left: someone who will sit with children and talk plainly. The Princess has described, in her own messages since treatment, the decision she and William made to be honest with Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis about what was happening. Bowen’s thanks suggested that the same instinct had been extended beyond their own household.
The evening was not a celebration of recovery alone. Cancer Research UK used the anniversary to argue for renewed investment in prevention, earlier detection and kinder treatment. Survival in the UK has doubled over 50 years, but the charity’s own figures still describe a disease that will touch almost half the population. Standing beside the King, who remains in treatment, the Princess’s presence made that unfinished work visible. She was there as a patron’s daughter-in-law, as a former patient, and as someone who had spent the previous two years explaining an illness to three children.
What the public took from the night, though, was the shorter sentence. “So do I” is not a speech. Set against the months in which the Princess withdrew from duties, completed chemotherapy and then returned, it read as a statement of dependence as much as affection. William has said in other settings that he could not have managed without her, and has called her a wonderful mother. At St James’s Palace she returned the compliment without ceremony, in front of a singer who had asked only to be remembered to her husband.
The couple still keep most of their marriage off stage. What has changed since 2024 is the willingness to let a fragment of it be heard: a laugh in a reception line, a defence of a husband’s gentleness offered to a widower, a public acknowledgement that the family talked its way through the worst of it. The 125th anniversary belonged to the researchers and the volunteers. The line that left the palace belonged to a marriage that had been tested in the open, and had chosen, for a moment, to say so.
