Ex-leader wanted Lord Elis-Thomas back in Plaid
Getty ImagesFormer Plaid Cymru leader Lord Wigley says he would have liked his late colleague Lord Elis-Thomas to have returned to the party before his death.
Lord Elis-Thomas, also a former Plaid leader and first the Llywydd - or speaker - of the Welsh Assembly, died aged 78 on Friday.
His biographer, Aled Eirug, told BBC Politics Wales his old party behaved "shabbily" when Lord Elis-Thomas applied to rejoin in 2023.
Plaid Cymru has been asked to comment.
Lord Elis-Thomas left it in 2016 to sit as an independent and became a minister in Carwyn Jones' Labour Welsh government.
But his bid to return to his original political home in August 2023 was abandoned.
Lord Wigley said he would have "very much" liked to have seen his former colleague return, adding: "I regretted very much that he'd gone."
Conditions, he said, were put on his rejoining and he was "not willing to go along with those".
Mr Eirug said Lord Elis-Thomas was "keen" to return to the party under Rhun ap Iorwerth.
"Instead of Plaid welcoming somebody who'd been of service to the party for 50 years and more, they created a tribunal, a disciplinary process which totally set to one side what Dafydd's record overall had been," he said.
Dafydd was Lord Elis-Thomas' first name.
He left Plaid Cymru over disagreements with then leader Leanne Wood.
Lord Wigley said he last spoke to his former colleague more than a year ago, before the plan to rejoin was ditched.
"The last conversation I had with him was the hopeful one that we would both be working together in the House of Lords on the Welsh agenda, and I was very sad that it hadn't happened," he said.