Leveson inquiry: Lord Condon, Lord Stevens, Lynne Owens - live

Leveson inquiry: Lord Condon is to give evidence. Photograph: Tom Shaw/Getty Images

10.54am: Party Hoskins says Condon says in his witness statement that "Hospitality is the start of a grooming process that can lead to inappropriate or unethical behaviour."

He says that inappropriate closeness with journalists can ultimately lead to criminal behaviour.

10.53am: Condon recalls how he gave a confidential briefing on IRA terrorism and how it remained off the record.

The Met briefed on the sort of the attack and the nature of the surveillance, which would go on for months at a stretch.
If the editors or their reporters started to pick up information and published it, it would have been damaging to the counter-terrorism initiative.

10.49am: Condon says his preference was that meetings were held at Scotland Yard or at the journalists' newspaper. Only on "a small handful of occasions" were they in a restaurant.

Condon then Daily Telegraph editor Max Hastings was an exception.
"Max Hastings as editor of the Telegraph and the Evening Standard always moaned about the quality of food at Scotland Yard and I think I weakened and I probably had lunch with Max, probably at his club," he says.
"I remember the doyen of the crime reporters, Peter Burden, I remember having a lunch with him at the end of this time when he was retiring.
"I remember a lunch or a dinner with an editor of the Sun, Stuart Higgins."

10.41am: Condon says he invited all print, TV and radio editors to brief them on his planned reforms. He says he aimed to brief each of the editors once a year.

He held about eight to 12 meetings a year with editors. He says the commissioner must be totally apolitical and without favourites in the media.
"No editor seems to have had more than one [meeting] a year," says Condon.
This is in contrast to yesterday's evidence when the inquiry heard how the last commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, met former News of the World deputy editor Neil Wallis several times a year.

10.36am: Condon is asked about how he built relationships with journalists.

He says it had been a longstanding arrangement that the commisisoner of the day met with crime reporters. In his time, this practice "petered out" and meetings with the Crime Reporters' Association were no longer monthly events.
The CRA didn't seem to be as "tight" or elitist as the parliamentary lobby, Condon says.

10.35am: Condon says it was "a sensitive issue" to invite the media to witness the arrests. The dignity and the rights of the suspects had to be respected so the footage would not be the police in someone's bedroom at 6am in the morning, but pictures of police breaking into the premises.

He says he would have been very angry if he had seen anything that showed the media had trespassed into private property.
"They [these raids] were very tightly controlled," he says.

10.29am: Condon gives as an example as Operation Bumblebee, the campaign to reduce domestic burglary.

He says the Met staged events that "captured the imagination and transferred fear from the public to the burglars", such as making 200-300 arrests on one day. The media would be told about this and there would be dramatic footage of the raids.
Condon would front such events through personal briefings and interviews.

10.28am: Condon says the Met did not have a website until 1996 or 1997, and previously a small number of editors and leader writers dominated the media agenda around policing.

The internet and social media have given the police more opportunities to communicate directly to the public, but in his era a high level of contact with the media was necessary.

10.28am: Condon says his dealings with the media were completely different from anything he had encountered before.

However, he tells Patry Hoskins, this did not detract from his ability to fight crime.
"Rightly or wrongly, the commissioner is seen as the voice of the police force," he adds.

10.26am: Stevens says his professional relationship with the media became "a significant part of my life and at times would completely dominate it".

He had to deal with IRA terrorism in his time as well as the royal family and the policing of London, in itself a huge job.
"There would be insatiable demand for the commissioner of the day to be saying things about it, to be saying things to the public," he adds.

10.23am: Condon has been out of the force now for 13 years and says he is reluctant to comment on the police force currently but says he would be amazed if there wasn't a serious attitude to malpratice.

10.21am: Condon says he was delighted to get John Stevens in has his deputy in 1998 as he was able to carry through his policy when he took over in 2000.

One of the key planks of the strategy was detection of corruption. One of the issues identified was to research cultural issues that might act as a barrier to staff whistleblowing.
"Some people think its wrong to inform on their colleagues, some might be frightened to do it … What I was seeking to do was to leigitimise, to demand and to encourage, that it was the right thing to do to whistleblow."

10.19am: Everyone in the Met would have been in no doubt by the end of 1998 how serious it was about dealing with the issues of corruption, he says.

The strategy document was not an "ephemeral, quick in and out" policy on corruption, he adds.

10.15am: Condon says he started a campaign that eventually led to changes in regulations on police discipline.

His anti-corruption strategy was the culmination of a number of years work – 1997 and 1998 were particularly busy.
Early in 1998 he remembers, that with warrants, the Met raided the homes of about 30 serving and retired police officers.
He wanted before the end of 1998 to deal with the malpractice and produced a document to define the "rules of engagement" on corruption.

10.12am: Patry Hoskins asks Condon about his experience of countering police corruption.

When he was appointed as head of the Met in 1993, he was briefed on a number of corrupt officers.
There was a hope and expectation that he would find ways of responding to this challenge.
Condon says in any big force "there will always be a small number of police officers who can sadly be drawn into criminal matters".
Police corruption linked to the media was "not part of the briefing and at the time was not my concern," he says.
He says the motivation for corruption was "primarily financial gain".

10.07am: Condon joined the police force in 1967, and is a former chief constable of Kent police. He was commissioner of the Met from 1993 to 2000, when he was succeeded by his deputy, Lord Stevens.

He is an independent member of the House of Lords, and is chairman of the International Cricket Council's anti-corruption unit. He has served on a number of commercial boards in the US and Australia.

10.04am: Lord Condon, the former Met commissioner, will be the first witness.

Carine Patry Hoskins, junior counsel to the inquiry, is doing the questioning.