Question: What can we expect from the party conference this month?

Elfyn Llwyd: We have an interesting innovation - Mark Serwotka of the PCS union is coming to address us, and we have various groups such as the Kurdish people coming along to lobby.

What will be coming out of it will be some positive pointers to the 20 main policy areas we'd like to put in our manifesto for the forthcoming assembly election in 2007.

Question: What is the mood in the party?

Elfyn Llwyd: It's quite buoyant. We had an astounding [county council] by-election victory about six weeks ago in Rhos-on-Sea near Colwyn Bay, which was probably the safest Tory seat in Wales. The Plaid fellow, Phil Edwards, had a 176 per cent swing.

He's also our assembly candidate in that constituency. We're quite excited about developments because if we can win there we can win anywhere.

Question: Do you think you'll be able to capitalise on what some people see as leadership disarray in the Labour Party?

Elfyn Llwyd: Look at Blaenau Gwent for example, I think the old Labour hegemony in Wales is breaking down, as indeed we see the large industries breaking down, people are looking at things individually.

And indeed I think the longer Tony Blair is there the worse it will get for them, and I think with respect to Rhodri [Morgan] that he's run out of steam completely.

There are no new ideas coming out of the Labour cabinet in Wales. They are topping and tailing English policies, they are not thinking outside of the box and looking at Welsh issues and really I think they’re undermining the whole [devolution] process at the moment.

Not that we have to do things differently all the time, but there are times when we should be doing things differently because things are slightly different in parts of Wales than for example central London.

Clearly we can learn from some good stuff going on in England and in Scotland as well, but there are times when we need to think about our own issues and our own issues alone.

While we're slavishly following Westminster's line we've got a terrible health service, the wheels are falling off the ambulance service, although money is being put in it's like water dissipating in the sand.

We're not going anywhere. We're going backward not forward.

Question: Are the assembly's powers enough to deal with these problems?

Elfyn Llwyd: Although we would want to see a full parliament in due course, even with the powers that we have we will be suggesting 20 different policy areas we can put into affect and costing them between now and when the manifesto is launched.

Question: If Labour's dominance in Wales is over, do you see Plaid as its successor?

Elfyn Llwyd: I do. We've always been a community-based party, we've always had a great social conscience.

We've never been very keen on this privatisation agenda which is all Labour have now, and if we can win the safest Tory seat in Wales then we can win anywhere. We would like to be the largest party in the National Assembly.

Question: Do you see any sign in Wales of a Tory revival?

Elfyn Llwyd: If you look at Rhos-on-Sea then I don’t. Of course being realistic you can’t base everything on one by-election result, and there are some green shoots here and there which we need to keep an eye on.

But I don't think we will ever return to the days when there was a great bulk of Tory seats in Wales. The Thatcher years are still a recent memory and there are some raw memories there - people won't readily forget them.

Question: What can we expect from the manifesto?

Elfyn Llwyd: All our commitments will be deliverable in the first term of the assembly and I'm quite excited about the professionalism with which we've approached and costed it as well.

It’s going to be a positive way of telling the electorate in Wales that if you vote for us this is exactly what you're going to get. It's going to be an attractive proposition and deliverable as well.

Question: Does the party still struggle with the perception that it is elitist and only for Welsh speakers?

Elfyn Llwyd: A good percentage of our executive not only don't speak Welsh but were born in England. Our main North Wales candidate on the list is Janet Ryder who was born on Teeside and we have more ethnic minority councillors in Wales than all the other parties put together.

We also have an Asian gentleman in Newport, Mohammad Asghar, who's in a winnable position on the list to become hopefully the first ethnic minority assembly member in Wales. By all accounts he's likely to become the first ethnic minority assembly member and we're very proud of that fact.

Question: So is 2007 a decisive year for Plaid?

Elfyn Llwyd: It's a huge year for us. We must move forward otherwise there will be difficulties. We must be the largest party in the assembly. If not we must be the largest opposition party, that's the danger, and we must strive to win new seats.

We now have to think seriously about what we would do if we were in power. Who knows what will happen next summer -  whether there will be understandings with various parties I don't know - but we've had to look at this very professionally, very seriously and have a programme for change which is affordable and deliverable.

Question: So you think power-sharing could be on the cards?

Elfyn Llwyd: We're not looking at that now, we're looking at becoming the main party. But in the nature of things that’s not an impossibility.

Question: What do you think of the new Government of Wales Act?

Elfyn Llwyd: It was a useful step forward, but what worries me is that everywhere in that Act there's a veto for the secretary of state. If he wants to veto legislation in the National Assembly then he does so and you've got to go cap in hand to him each time to ask if a particular piece of legislation can be brought forward.

An unsympathetic secretary of state would say we won't allow you to legislate on that and kick it into the long grass. It's an unfortunate missed opportunity to give us a process whereby we don't have to go bowing and scraping all the time to pass legislation.

Question: How do you see your role at Westminster as a member of a minority party?

Elfyn Llwyd: Our role has been fairly significant. We led the impeachment call of the prime minister, we, together with our friends in the SNP, led on cash-for-peerages, our colleagues blew the gaff on the Mittal scandal. All of this is because of our work. We punch above our weight and we deal with international issues as well as national issues.

Clearly we'll never be the majority party at Westminster, we don't pretend to that, but I think we can make life interesting for the governing party.