UPDATE 2-Nigel Farage, leader of Britain's anti-EU party, U-turns on resignation

May 11, 2015 2:24 PM

(Adds Farage quotes)

By William James

LONDON, May 11 (Reuters) - Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain's anti-EU UK Independence Party, on Monday withdrew his resignation after tendering it last week over his failure to win a seat in the British parliament.

UKIP, which wants Britain to withdraw from the European Union, won just one seat in a national election last week, despite talking up its chances of doing much better after winning European elections in Britain last year.

Farage, UKIP's best-known politician, stood down on Friday after losing to a candidate from David Cameron's Conservative Party, making good on a promise to resign he had made before the election. He said he was a man of his word.

But on Monday, Farage said he'd been persuaded to stay by the party's National Executive Committee, who rejected his resignation and told him that there was overwhelming evidence members wanted him to stay.

"I decided that ... as much as I wanted to spend the summer fishing, walking, and of course, in the European Parliament where all hell is currently breaking loose - that I owed it to the party that got me here," Farage wrote in an article for The Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Farage said he wanted to start campaigning for Britain to leave the EU when Cameron holds a referendum on the issue before the end of 2017.

"I feel the need to stay involved for just a little bit longer, to add my voice to those who want Britain to be a country that trades and deals with the world, rather than ties itself to a post-WWII (World War Two) mindset about Europe and the political union," he said.

UKIP won about 13 percent of the vote nationally, the best result in the party's history by a large margin. But because of Britain's winner-takes-all voting system that only translated into a single parliamentary seat. (Editing by Andrew Osborn)

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