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When Leanne Wood was elected leader of Plaid Cymru in early 2012, she was seen as an insurgent candidate who had defeated two candidates from the party’s establishment – Ceredigion AM Elin Jones, who had been the favourite and is now the Presiding Officer, and Dafydd Elis-Thomas, a former leader and recently dethroned Presiding Officer who fancied another challenge.

She became Plaid’s first woman leader on a prospectus of taking the party to the left and winning seats across the Valleys – a necessary aim if it was to have any chance of leading Wales.

Counter-intuitively, as someone who was not a first-language Welsh speaker nor entirely fluent in the language, she received a lot of support from members of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, the Welsh Language Society, who believed she would take a more radical stance in favour of the language than her two rivals.

After the country solicitor style of her predecessor Ieuan Wyn Jones, her working class roots in the Valleys were seen as an asset that gave her authenticity and an ability to relate to voters in a way many other politicians could not.

Ms Wood faced no significant electoral challenges until three years later, when she found herself exposed to a network TV audience during the leaders’ debates in the run-up to the 2015 General Election. She had some image training and a style makeover, and got a positive response when she delivered a one-liner put-down of Nigel Farage. But there was no getting away from the fact that she was overshadowed by her fellow nationalist and friend Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader and First Minister of Scotland.

In electoral terms Plaid made no breakthrough, keeping its three seats but falling short – sometimes way short – in those it hoped to gain.

In the 2016 National Assembly election, Plaid had just one outstanding result: Leanne Wood’s own stunning victory in her home constituency of Rhondda, where she defeated Leighton Andrews, one of Labour’s best-known Ministers.

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Elsewhere, though, the results were patchy, although Plaid did succeed in regaining its position as the biggest opposition party. In seats where Plaid might at other times have expected a surge in support, voters were switching from Labour to Ukip instead. The anti-EU party won seven seats, with voters finding the allure of what was essentially a right-wing English nationalist party greater than that of the so-called Party of Wales. Pleas from Ms Wood not to vote for Ukip, which she said was an anti-Welsh party, went unheeded. Weeks later a majority of her own constituents voted for Brexit, together with a majority of voters in Wales, disproving once and for all the conventional wisdom that the country was a repository of pro-EU sentiment thanks to the large amount of European money that had been pumped into local projects.

The unexpected General Election in 2017 saw Plaid largely sidelined, with the battle between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn seen as the main event. After dithering over whether to stand in Rhondda’s Westminster seat, before deciding not to do so, Ms Wood was fortunate indeed that a total of around 200 votes went the way they did in two seats. If Plaid’s number of MPs had gone down to two instead of rising to four, she would surely have had to resign.

At the Assembly, Plaid now has two seats fewer than it won in 2016 following the departures of Dafydd Elis-Thomas - now an Independent member of the Labour government – and Neil McEvoy, expelled from the Assembly group and the party. Both blame Leanne Wood for their departure.

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A local party rebellion in Llanelli has seen the loss of dozens of members – this time because of troubles arising out of the imposition of an outside General Election candidate. Ms Wood has again been blamed for the dispute.

Ukip aside, this is the first time an incumbent party leader in Wales has been defeated when seeking re-election. If it’s unusual, it’s not wholly unexpected.

Only one AM and not a single MP was prepared to nominate Ms Wood for the leadership. As the campaign progressed, senior party figures told us that the party was going nowhere under her leadership, that there was no sense of direction given by her to the Westminster group, and that she had shown no real wish to combat Brexit.

It emerged that members of the Plaid Assembly group had asked her to stand down graciously, but she refused to go.

Some of those attending the hustings meetings have reported poor performances by Ms Wood, with her saying there was no need for a leadership challenge, for example, implying to members that they were wasting their time by attending.

On another occasion she got a negative reaction by suggesting that the pro-independence group Yes Cymru should effectively be controlled by Plaid Cymru.

Other reasons for her defeat include the view that she was taking the party too far to the left at a time when Jeremy Corbyn was occupying that territory more effectively, and that she devoted too much attention to identity politics and not enough to preparing the country for government and ultimately independence.