Before 8 June, Theresa May had sketched out a new cabinet. It would reflect her mighty status as the prime minister who had won the nation’s endorsement. Out would go her troublesome chancellor, Philip Hammond. In his place would come her closest ally and oldest political friend, Damian Green. Even as she reeled from the catastrophic election result on Friday, insiders were still expecting a reshuffle. By Saturday morning it was clear that she lacked even the muscle to appoint her own top team. Every senior minister was to stay. Former communications director Katie Perrior exposed the dysfunction at the heart of government and by lunchtime a huge party revolt forced the resignation of her two closest advisers, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. The phrase “in office but not in power” might have been coined for this moment.

So when the reshuffle arrived, it was a demonstration not of strength but of weakness, Mrs May’s last feeble bid to cling to ebbing power. The campaign to persuade voters that she alone could provide strong and stable government leaves her too weak to keep her closest advisers, too weak to move any of her most senior ministers, too weak, regardless of her “Queen of denial” words on the steps of Downing Street on Friday, to have the remotest chance of staying in power for the next five years. Instead she must rely on the 10 MPs of the DUP, a party whose leader’s earlier conduct is jeopardising power-sharing at Stormont. She is protected in office by a praetorian guard of the most inflexible of the Tory Brexiters, Iain Duncan Smith, Bernard Jenkin and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Even her cheerleaders in the rightwing press have been silenced; and her party, which has crashed the economy and crashed Britain’s relationship with Europe, has now been crashed itself, by its leader. As George Osborne, the chancellor she did sack, declared on breakfast TV , she’s a dead woman walking.

These are the Herculean tasks she must accomplish to stay afloat: first she must survive tomorrow afternoon’s encounter with her backbenchers. Anything less than a barnstorming performance is inadequate. If she had succeeded, even partially, in her ambition to increase her majority, she might have won space to chart her own course through the Brexit negotiations. Now those prepared to sacrifice membership of the single market and the customs union in order to control immigration and escape the jurisdiction of the European court of justice spring to her defence to lock her into the kind of Brexit for which there may now be no majority in the Commons (although Labour’s lack of clarity on managing immigration makes that too uncertain).

On Tuesday, she has to negotiate what will probably be a confidence and supply arrangement with Arlene Foster, the DUP leader. That won’t mean the DUP’s offensive and reactionary approach to social legislation being imposed in Britain, something flatly rejected both the Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson and her dozen-strong army of Westminster MPs, and many other Conservative backbenchers at Westminster too. All the same, as Jonathan Powell, who was intimately involved in the Good Friday agreement, warned in the Observer, from Belfast it risks looking as if Westminster is taking sides just as relations between the two main parties stutter. That is bad for the whole country. And even a minimalist deal with the DUP is likely to mean the autumn budget will have none of the Tory manifesto pledges on removing the triple lock and means-testing other pensioner benefits.

Next, May must prepare a Queen’s speech that reflects reality: palatable to her own MPs, and not too provocative to a House of Commons with no reason to grant her the respect that a newly elected prime minister can normally claim for their first policy programme. Her personal project to turn the Tories back into something like the one-nation party of the 1950s lies in tatters. Over it all loom Brexit talks, due to start next week, a task that dwarfs domestic politics, the future of austerity and the prospects for a whole generation of young Britons. Yet these are issues that must be tackled if the deep divisions exposed again by the election are to be healed.

The new cabinet hugs close her potential rivals. She has had to bring back one of her most vehement critics, the leading Brexiter Michael Gove. And though Damian Green, now first secretary of state, is a loyal ally, this is really adieu, Team May. Instead, it looks rather like a comeback gig for the Cameroons, minus the frontman who held them all together.