Llinos Medi, Plaid Cymru MP for Ynys Môn since 2024, has one of the most genuinely working class trajectories of anyone in the current Commons: a farmer's daughter who left school at 16 and was working in care homes at 18, long before she led a council or won a seat.

Born around 1981 and raised on a farm in Llanddona, on Anglesey, she is the daughter of a first generation farmer, a background she describes plainly: her father, she has said, "had several jobs as did my mother to start the farm off". She was educated entirely on the island, at the village primary in Llanddona, Ysgol David Hughes and Coleg Pencraig in Llangefni, left school at 16, took a social care course and began working in the island's council care homes at 18. She has no university degree. Her working life before politics was the island economy in miniature: care worker, youth worker, teaching assistant, egg seller and milk recorder on local farms.

That biography is the point of her politics. She has said she initially lacked the confidence to canvass and feared politics "was not a space for someone like her", and that she now wants other women to look at her and think, "If she can do it, I can do it". The route she took was local government. Elected to the Isle of Anglesey County Council for Talybolion in 2013, she led the Plaid group from 2015 and was council leader from May 2017 to July 2024, seven years, also serving as the Welsh Local Government Association's spokesperson for social services. In 2020 the Women's Equality Network named her one of its 100 Welsh Women.

She arrived at Westminster narrowly. In July 2024 she won Ynys Môn on 10,590 votes, 32 per cent, with a majority of just 637, taking the seat from the Conservative Virginia Crosbie, and took her oath in both Welsh and English. She sits on the Welsh Affairs Committee.

The vulnerability is in the numbers. A 2.0 per cent majority on a 32 per cent share, with Labour close behind on 23, is a three way marginal that one bad swing erases, and Plaid's small Commons group has little legislative weight. Her lack of a university background, an asset for authenticity, also leaves her outside the networks many MPs arrive with. None of that changes what she brings: seven years running a council and a lifetime on the island she represents give her more hands on delivery experience than most new members.

At 43, the test is concrete. Whether her Welsh Affairs Committee work and constituency advocacy produce visible movement on Wylfa, the ferries, housing, health access and the island economy will decide whether 637 votes harden into a secure Plaid hold, or whether Ynys Môn reverts to the marginal it has so often been.