LABOUR’s civil war intensified yesterday as MPs gave warning of attempts by hardline Blairites this weekend to “take out” Gordon Brown, as well as a revival of pressure on the Prime Minister to step down soon.

As Downing Street braced itself for more bloodletting, it has emerged that the plot to remove Tony Blair this week was far more ambitious than hitherto revealed, and that some of the conspirators expected him to be out by the end of this week.

The Times can reveal that the letter from MPs calling on Mr Blair to quit was envisaged as one part of a four-pronged strike to end his career. The aim, according to the plotters, was for Mr Blair to be toppled within days.

Three successive letters calling on him to quit would be followed by a delegation of ministers to No 10 demanding that he move aside for the Chancellor. Mr Blair would be “gone by Saturday”, according to one of those involved.

The revelations came as ferocious attacks on Mr Brown by Charles Clarke and Frank Field were seized upon by the Chancellor’s allies and mainstream MPs as evidence that the turmoil would not stop until a leadership contest was called. They also contended that the “ultra-Blairites” saw the next few days as crucial to stopping the Chancellor.

Labour MPs said that unless Mr Blair silenced his “outriders” he would face delegations next week telling him to go now in the interests of the party. There was talk that an emergency meeting of the parliamentary party could be called before the Labour conference.

But the scale of the attacks on Mr Brown also aroused feverish speculation about who might challenge him. There were claims — denied by his aides — that Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, was putting together a campaign team for the deputy leadership election, which could swiftly be transformed into a bid for the leadership.

Advance trailings of speeches next week by Alan Milburn, the former Health Secretary, and John Hutton, the Work and Pensions Secretary, led Brownite MPs to warn of further attempts to keep the Chancellor under pressure. It was also claimed that tendentious accounts of the meetings this week between Mr Blair and Mr Brown — attended only by the two men — would be put out to show the Chancellor in the poorest possible light.

Mr Clarke accused Mr Brown of “absolutely stupid behaviour” and said that he could have stopped the week’s plotting “with a click of his fingers”. In a later interview with The Daily Telegraph, he called the Chancellor a “control freak” who “can’t work with people” and who was “totally uncollegiate” in his decision-taking. “He’s not a risk taker and you’ve got to be a risk taker in politics,” Mr Clarke went on. “The courage question is a big thing for Gordon.”

Brownite MPs demanded that Mr Blair rebuke Mr Clarke to show that the truce was holding. The Prime Minister’s spokesman declined to comment at a morning briefing but later Downing Street aligned itself with a reaction from Ruth Kelly, the Local Government Minister, who said that Mr Clarke was wrong.

The scale of the plotting was far wider than thought, The Times has learnt. Although the first letter to the Prime Minister was sent — with devastating results — the second and third letters, which it had been planned would come from the 2005 and 1997 intakes of MPs, never materialised.

It also emerged yesterday that Mr Blair had planned to tell the next Cabinet meeting, on September 20, that this year’s Labour Party conference would be his last. He intended to elaborate at the conference in Manchester, which starts on September 24.

Mr Blair was bolstered last week by a succession of Cabinet colleagues who told him that he could not be forced out of office, but that he had to be clear about his intentions.

He had one-to-one meetings with Jack Straw, Mr Johnson, Hilary Benn, David Miliband, John Prescott and Patricia Hewitt.

One aide said: “At the end of the week Gordon has attracted from Tony in public what Tony had told him on numerous occasions in private, at great cost to Tony, to himself and to the party. He has to ask himself, was it worth it?”

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