UKIP needs new leader, says MP Carswell

By Kylie MacLellan LONDON (Reuters) - The anti-EU UK Independence Party needs a fresh face as leader, its only MP said on Friday, highlighting divisions in a party which will play a key role in the campaign for Britain to leave the bloc at an upcoming membership referendum. Prime Minister David Cameron promised that vote in part due to pressure from the rise in popularity of UKIP, which won 2014's European elections in Britain and posed a threat to his Conservative Party ahead of May's national election. UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who casts himself as a beer-drinking man of the people, has helped turn UKIP from a fringe movement into a political force that came third in May with more than 12 percent of the vote. But under Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system it emerged with just one lawmaker and this month failed to make expected inroads in a vote for a parliamentary seat in Oldham in northern England. "It is not for me to decide who the leader of the party is but I think it is fair to say that we all need to think very carefully as to whether or not we can build beyond the base that we have now got without that change," UKIP MP Douglas Carswell told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Friday. "Sometimes a start-up needs to change gear and to change its management if it's to go the next level and the Oldham by-election to me said, very clearly, that I think we need a fresh face," added Carswell, who defected from Cameron's Conservatives last year and has ruled himself out of the top UKIP job. Farage, an outspoken 51-year-old former commodities trader and member of the European Parliament, dismissed Carswell's comments, saying UKIP voters were behind his leadership. "We have one person who disagrees with my leadership. Douglas Carswell is completely out on a limb, and we cannot allow somebody to go on sowing division where none exists," he told the BBC. "He must put up or shut up." UKIP has often been criticised as a one-man band and during a power struggle in May the party's then campaign chief accused advisers of creating a "personality cult" around Farage. Farage kept a pledge to resign as party leader in May after failing to win a seat in parliament himself but reversed the decision three days later saying he had been persuaded by party officials to stay on. He is now involved in one of the main 'out' referendum campaign groups, and said it was "inappropriate" for Carswell to be making such comments on a day when the party should be focused on Cameron's renegotiation discussions with other EU leaders in Brussels. Matthew Goodwin, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent and an author of books on UKIP, said Carswell's comments were likely motivated by concern over the direction of the referendum and the "leave" camp's failure to establish a clear lead in the polls so far. "I suspect that this is reflecting an attempt to perhaps push Farage out of the way, somebody who many Eurosceptics view as being toxic and damaging to the leave side, ... to clear the path for a more moderate and perhaps more mainstream euroscepticism," he said. (Additional reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Stephen Addison)