It has been a good few days for Leanne Wood. Her first official engagement as the new leader of Plaid Cymru was to congratulate the victorious Welsh rugby team, fresh from its grand slam in the Six Nations. Her opening week at the helm ended with a rousing welcome from the party faithful at the nationalists' spring conference on a sun-dappled racecourse in west Wales.
In between, she launched an economic commission, enjoyed a typically robust exchange with the Welsh first minister, reshuffled her spokespeople and had time to repeat time and again that she would not dilute her strong opinions on everything, from the monarchy – she was once expelled from the Welsh assembly after calling the Queen Mrs Windsor – to women's rights.
"We are living in unusual and difficult times economically and that means that people are thinking differently about the kind of politics and politicians they want to see," she said. "Electing more women and becoming more radical is part of that. We can't go on in the old way, electing the same old faces, the same old friends. Let's try something different. I recognise that to get things done some compromise is inevitable but I have very firm principles and I have no intention of dropping them."
So does she regret the run-in over the monarchy? "I'm a republican. I always have been and always will be. I think the monarchy is an antiquated institution and something that symbolises inequality and I'm in favour of equality," she said.
Wood threatens to be one of the most interesting politicians to emerge in Wales for some time. A 40-year-old former probation officer and women's support officer from the Rhondda Valley in south Wales, Wood sums herself up on Twitter as: "Plaid Cymru. Welsh Socialist & Republican. Environmentalist. Anti-racist. Feminist. Valleys."
During her leadership campaign she dismissed the Tory-Lib Dem coalition at Westminster as a "hyper-competitive, imperial/militaristic climate-change-ignoring and privatising government". She also insisted that independence for Wales was no longer an "impossible dream" and it was possible to start talking about independence in a "normalised way".
Wood was seen as an outsider for the leadership but won in style. She is still regarded as a gamble – several delegates pointed out that holding the conference at the Ffos Las racecourse in Carmarthenshire seemed fitting – but her party hopes that she will be able to poach traditional Labour voters in areas such as the valleys and attract younger people and women. The danger is that Wood, not a fluent Welsh speaker, could lose some more conservative members.
But a party that was once derided as being for males as much as for Wales now has four women in the key posts of leader, chief executive, chair and president. "Women are running the party," said Wood. "It's certainly a change from what we've had in the past."
For all the talk of a new kind of politics, she is not afraid to speak of old-fashioned socialist values, too. "Socialism is an old-fashioned word and for some people an offputting word. But I describe myself as a socialist. Plaid Cymru has socialism in our aims, to create a decent socialist world. That's the direction we are going to continue in.
"But it's not anything out of the mainstream. People in Wales tend to be on the left, that's reflected in election results going back over a century. I think there's a natural left-ness in Wales that is reflected in Plaid Cymru. In these times I think we can do a lot with that."
Wood emphasises how important the Rhondda, where she has lived in the same street since she was five, is to her. "I know everyone in the street. It's a proper community. In the Rhondda, and throughout Wales, there is a very strong community spirit and that is something we should harness now. We need to go back to old values. Our communities in the past were built by using the pennies and the time of miners who built institutions like our libraries. If they did it in the 20s and 30s there's no reason why people can't come together now and make sure local communities can thrive and survive."
Last spring was horrible for Plaid. The party had been governing in coalition with Labour but during the assembly election campaign its partner managed to present itself as the party that would protect Wales against cuts imposed by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition at Westminster. Labour grabbed half of the assembly's 60 seats and set up a minority government. Plaid dropped into third place behind the Tories and was in danger of looking irrelevant.
Wood, who was speaking ahead of her maiden conference speech as leader, said she was frustrated at the "lack of ambition" in Welsh Labour.
"There's an economic crisis causing serious hardship for may people and communities in Wales. It's shocking the number of people who can't afford to put food on the table. Labour needs to pull its finger out."
Her first major initiative was to set up an economic commission headed by the former Plaid MP Adam Price, one of the party's brightest sparks.
"Our economy in Wales is very weak," said Wood. "I want to bring together some of the best brains and talents in and out of Plaid Cymru and put together a long-term economic plan to turn around our misfortunes. We've got to get to the point where we refuse to accept poverty is inevitable and grasp the opportunities that exist."
In his conference welcome, the leader of the Plaid group on Carmarthenshire county council, Peter Hughes Griffiths, compared Wood to Princess Gwenllian, who led a Welsh army into battle against the Normans in the 12th century and died at Kidwelly castle, just down the road from the racecourse.
The economy is the modern battleground. Wood believes that if the economy grows strong again, it will be possible for Wales to become independent.
"I'm calling for real independence. Not constitutional change for the sake of it but change so we can sort out things like our economic problems, so we can make decisions for ourselves.
"The situation we've got at the moment [is] where the Welsh economy is tied into the bigger UK economy in which London and the south-east gets all the attention. Wales as a peripheral part of the UK will always lose out so if we're going to prosper we will have to make the break. We have to take this twin-track approach: strengthen the economy now and create as many jobs as possible and in the long term we can become an independent nation in charge of our own destiny."
