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Gordon Brown is privately ready to sacrifice the Lisbon treaty rather than allow the Irish no vote to create a two-tier Europe.

Despite the Irish referendum, France, Germany and senior Brussels officials have insisted there should be no delay in implementing the European Union blueprint. But No 10 sources say the prime minister would rather see the entire constitutional treaty collapse than allow individual member states to be left trailing in a two-speed Europe.

The collapse of the Lisbon treaty would take the heat off Brown as he faces down renewed calls for Britain to have its own referendum. If Europe presses ahead without Ireland, it would set a precedent for a two-speed club, with Britain likely to be stuck in the second tier.

A Downing Street source said: “The legal position on this is very clear: the treaty cannot come into force until all 27 countries have ratified it.”

One senior government official said anyone who thought the Irish vote could be ignored was “living in cloud-cuckoo-land”. The leaders of the EU’s 27 members states will meet this week in Brussels, but yesterday the Irish government ruled out forcing through a second referendum.

William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, said European leaders had to heed the no vote or risk looking “remote, out of touch and more undemocratic than ever”.

However, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president who will take over the rotating EU presidency next month, dismissed the Irish vote as a “hiccup” that should “not become a political crisis”.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s foreign minister, went further, stating that the Lisbon treaty provisions, which include the creation of a permanent EU president and the widespread abolition of national vetoes, could be implemented without Ireland.

“Ireland for a period of time could leave the way free for the integration of the other 26 member states,” he said.

In public, British ministers are insisting that a solution to the impasse can still be found. Jim Murphy, the Europe minister, yesterday told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Only those who previously wished to dance on the grave of this treaty, even before the Irish referendum, are declaring it dead.”

In private, the mood among senior Whitehall officials is more pessimistic. “No one wants to come out publicly now and say ‘the treaty is dead’,” said one. “But by the end of the week, after the Brussels summit, that could well be the case.”

In the short term, Brown will press ahead with Britain’s own ratification process. Despite calls by the Tories and Labour Eurosceptics for a delay, the treaty bill will still have its third reading vote in the House of Lords on Wednesday. “We have come so far,” said one senior government figure, “there is little point in stopping it now.”

In Brussels, meanwhile, after the initial shock of the Irish result, senior officials have already begun considering the complex legal mechanisms that might still allow the stricken treaty to be implemented. The details of any “two-speed” plan have yet to be worked out, but it is likely to involve devices such as “opt-outs” and “protocols”. One exotic idea being considered is a “legal bridge” linking Ireland with the rest of the EU.

Another scheme is to link aspects of the Lisbon treaty to the “accession treaty” of Croatia when it joins the EU in late 2009 or early 2010.

However, at this week’s Brussels summit, Brown will refuse to agree to anything that could leave the Irish out in the cold, according to aides.

The only EU leader so far to admit that the treaty is dead is Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, who declared the entire project “finished”.

“Ratification cannot be continued,” he said.

There are signs that across Europe political leaders will face growing public opposition if they disregard the Irish vote. A recent poll among French voters found that 52% believed that their leaders had not listened to their concerns about the “construction of Europe”.

“People feel despised and cheated by their leaders,” said Emmanuel Bordez, a political activist for the Mouvement pour la France party.

Dutch campaigners against the Lisbon treaty were jubilant, declaring the outcome “a victory for democracy”. On the website of De Telegraaf, the country’s largest newspaper, more than 95% of respondents applauded “Ireland’s courage”.

Harry van Bommel, the Dutch Socialist party MP, said Ireland’s no vote had left the Lisbon treaty “as dead as a doornail”.

Holland, along with France, had rejected the Lisbon treaty’s predecessor, the European constitution, in a referendum, but this time voters have been denied a ballot.

In Britain, leading Labour figures pronounced the Lisbon treaty dead and urged Brown to halt the slide towards European integration.

Gisela Stuart, the former Labour minister who sat on the panel that drafted the original European constitution, said: “The treaty is dead. If it was right for a ‘period of reflection’ after the Dutch and French voted no, it is appropriate for the UK to pause after the Irish vote.”

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