Helen Clark, the New Zealand Prime Minister, battled in vain for two hours to try to revive her close friend and mountain guide after he suffered a heart attack in front of her on an alpine camping trip.

Ms Clark and her husband Peter Davis frantically performed cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on Gottlieb Otto Braun-Elwert, 59, after he collapsed as they returned from a day’s skiing at Lake Tekapo in a remote part of the South Island yesterday. Other members of the group, including two Cabinet ministers, joined the resuscitation attempts in atrocious weather but Mr Braun-Elwert could not be saved.

Ms Clark, 58, insisted on travelling back down the mountain to tell the guide’s widow what had happened and had to be helped by rescue teams.

“It is just a terrible thing to see one of your old friends pass away like that,” Ms Clark told reporters back in the town of Tekapo.

“I think Gottlieb probably went pretty quickly. I saw him fall,” she added. “We got him into their hut and got him comfortable but I think it happened pretty fast.

“It was very harrowing but everybody rose to the occasion and we just threw everything we could at trying to help and trying to get support in.”

Mr Braun-Elwert had acted as a guide for Ms Clark and her husband more than a dozen times on cross-country skiing or climbing expeditions in New Zealand, South America and other countries over the past 11 years. He became a close family friend and together they climbed Mount Kiliman-jaro, Africa’s highest peak. Mr Braun-Elwert, a nuclear physicist, had been a mountain guide for 30 years and was the first person to climb all of New Zealand’s 3,000m-plus (9,843ft) peaks in a single winter season.

Ms Clark said that the party had spent two beautiful days skiing in the Two Thumbs range. “And we got to the hut door and two people went inside the hut and Gottlieb came back out of the hut and collapsed on the snow,” she said.

Dave Crow, from the New Zealand Mountain Guides Association, praised the party’s attempts to save his life. “They did an incredible job of trying to resuscitate him,” he said.

Appalling weather conditions made it impossible for a helicopter rescue but eventually Ms Clark and her husband were evacuated by four-wheel-drive and snowmobile from their hut.

They spent the rest of the night with Mr Braun-Elwert’s widow, Anne, in Tekapo.

With her two daughters beside her, the guide’s widow paid tribute to her husband and thanked Ms Clark. “They tried everything they could, doing CPR for two hours is pretty harrowing,” she said.

“We don’t really know what the real cause [of death] is. We are just guessing it was a heart attack. He was such a fit, strong man, it was the last thing I thought would have taken him.”

She said that the Prime Minister had gone on 13 trips with her husband.

Ms Clark, who has been Prime Minister since 1999, was asked by journalists if she would ever go back to the mountains.

“Yes, I will, but it is just a shame that Gottlieb won’t be there,” she said.

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