By politics.co.uk staff

Former home secretary Charles Clarke has instigated another vicious attack on Gordon Brown just as the prime minister prepares to address the United Nations.

Mr Clarke used an interview with the Evening Standard to lambast Mr Brown’s leadership and suggest he could use the excuse of ill health to stand down.

“I think his own dignity ought to look to that kind of solution,” he said.

“Are we just going to stand by and watch the whole Labour ship crash on to the rocks of May 2010 and sink for a very long time?

He then described the Downing Street team as “the weakest I’ve ever seen in my life”.

He continued: “You have a kind of joint view that it’s all over. That fatalism is absolutely suicidal for Labour. What makes it worse is that a lot of people in our party aren’t facing up to how serious a defeat would be,” he added.

“I think we would be out for 10 to 15 years and forget what it was like for progressives during the Tory years under Margaret Thatcher.

“Those who believe there is some kind of pendulum where we go out this year and come back next are completely and utterly wrong.”

Mr Clarke has a habit of attacking the prime minister just before party conferences, and his latest salvo is unlikely to impress delegates at the upcoming Labour conference in Brighton.