SARA Payne and Rebekah Wade (later Brooks) might have seemed like unlikely friends when they appeared together in Bournemouth in 2002 at the time of the Conservative Party conference.

Wade had been educated at a private school in Cheshire and claimed in Who’s Who to have studied for a while at Paris’s Sorbonne.

After newspaper work in Paris and on Eddie Shah’s Messenger group of newspapers in the North West of England, she had gone from being a secretary at the News of the World to its editor.

At 34, she was the youngest-ever editor of a British national paper, but was equally well-known for being the partner of EastEnders actor Ross Kemp.

Sara Payne was an ordinary mother who had been thrust into the media spotlight for the most tragic possible reasons.

After the kidnap and murder of her eight-year-old daughter Sarah in 2000, she had made it her mission to campaign for parents to know more about paedophiles living near them.

The two had come together for a controversial campaign to demand Sarah’s Law.

And the striking thing about them, when I met them in a fringe meeting organised by the News of the World in a Bournemouth hotel, was that their friendship seemed warm and genuine.

The two women reminisced about how Wade had driven to Sara’s home in Sussex to personally win her over to the idea of a campaign in the News of the World.

Wade may have risen quickly in the ruthless world of national newspapers, but she did not come across as the scarily ambitious character you might imagine.

In fact, she chatted to me as amiably as any journalist might talk to another.

At the time, Ian Huntley was awaiting trial for the murder of Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

Wade assumed I’d heard many of the same things she had about Huntley’s previous criminal record (I hadn’t, in fact).

She said it would all add weight to the Sarah’s Law campaign when the court case was over and the papers could report his earlier convictions.

“If someone like Roy Whiting, who killed Sarah, had been properly assessed, he would never have been let out in the community, especially in a seaside town full of children,” Wade told me.

We now know that Wade’s paper had given Sara Payne a mobile phone – one whose number turned up on the list of numbers in the possession of private investigator Glen Mulcaire.

Given how close the two women were, it’s not surprising that Sara Payne was ‘absolutely devastated’ to discover she may have been targeted by a phone hacking operation.

And it’s easy to see why Rebekah Brooks called the allegation ‘abhorrent’ and said: “The idea of her being targeted is beyond my comprehension.”

Sara Payne remained loyal to the News of the World to the end, writing in its final edition that it was an ‘old friend’.

So the latest revelations must have come as an awful breach of trust.

“I’m not a politician and I’m not a journalist,” she said in Bournemouth in 2002.

“I just do what I do because it’s the right thing. I think Sarah’s face says it all.”