Once a year, I went to see the Queen with my friend Helen Smeed. Helen, who has died aged 77 from a heart attack, was a long-time parliamentary researcher and personal assistant in the House of Lords. We would wait across the street from the Sovereign’s Entrance during the state opening of parliament and watch the resplendent horse-drawn carriages arrive. Afterwards, during lunch in the Lords’ canteen, Helen would always show her appreciation to the people who made parliament work, from cooks to policemen. She believed in public service. Helen and I met when we were neighbours on Buckingham Street, behind the Strand in London, during the 1990s. She rented out her spare room to dancers from the Royal Ballet. She had taken up pilates in 1970, as one of the first students of pilates in the UK, under Alan Herdman, and continued practising throughout her life. She spent many years at the charity Mencap in a number of roles, finally as personal assistant to the chairman Brian Rix, who later became Lord Rix. In 2007, she went to work in the House of Lords as the personal assistant to Geoffrey Howe until his death in 2015. Helen continued assisting Lady Howe on her campaign on children and internet safety, after her retirement from the Lords. Helen also worked for Lord Hunt of Wirral and finally for Lord Sterling of Plaistow. After the 2016 Brexit referendum, she helped to organise discussion and fundraising lunches for the remain campaign. For an American like me, confounded by British politics, Helen’s informal breakfast or lunchtime gatherings in the Lords or Commons’ canteens were instructive. She mentored younger parliamentary researchers, and was often seen carrying House of Lords shopping bags stuffed with files, papers and the latest Hansard. Every year, without fail, we attended the performances of the Russell Maliphant Dance Company. Maliphant had been one of Helen’s lodgers and she was godmother to his and Dana Fouras’s three children. Helen was born in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. Her mother, Dorothy Antrich, worked as a personal assistant to Harold Laski, the Labour political theorist and economist, before her marriage, and her father, Reuben Smeed, was an applied mathematician and professor of traffic at University College London, who was behind the 1964 Smeed report on road pricing. Helen attended St Bernard’s convent school in Slough, Berkshire, and went on to earn an MA in fine art and social anthropology from the University of Edinburgh. She spent a period on a kibbutz in Israel before returning to London in 1971, working as a medical receptionist and secretary for several years before joining Mencap. In 2003, Helen moved to Bray in Berkshire, where she enjoyed producing apple juice from her orchards at Brookmead Stables. Covid had stopped her from travelling to the Dordogne in France and a house she had kept there since 1972. She is survived by her brother, David, her niece, Annabel, and her nephews, Nicholas, Mathieu and Oliver.