“What I’d say to all my colleagues is the Conservative family – left, right and centre, because we’re a broad church – needs to come together in a spirit of mutual respect.” This is the kind of plea that is normally delivered to MPs behind closed doors. But in a sign of the dire state that the Tory party is in, David Lidington – Theresa May’s de facto deputy – was reduced to issuing it this weekend from the set of The Andrew Marr Show.

Lidington’s big pitch to stick together is that things could be worse. His list of lukewarm reasons to be cheerful include neck-and-neck polling with Labour and better-than-expected growth forecasts.

This call for calm comes after a week of government unravelling that has seen Theresa May go from “weak but stable” to “weak and on her final warning”. Instead of providing calm, the pause in the Brexit negotiations exposed May’s lack of domestic agenda and proved the final straw for many Conservatives. Ambitious MPs who returned from the Christmas break with new year optimism feel ignored by No 10 and are losing patience with a prime minister who seems constitutionally incapable of getting on to the front foot.

Concluding that the Maybot 2018 reboot hasn’t solved the problems that dogged the 2017 edition, grumpy Tories have taken to Twitter with anti-May hashtags: #dulldulldull. Others have opted for the more traditional medium of print, with Johnny Mercer warning it’s time to prepare for Prime Minister Corbyn unless we “get our shit together”. The headlines couldn’t get much worse and there are reports that the number of letters sent to the 1922 Committee chairman, Graham Brady, is perilously close to the magic number required for a confidence vote.

It’s a sorry state of affairs for a party of government in the midst of the most important negotiations in decades. Yet it’s still not clear that anything has actually changed when it comes to May’s position. The same factors that kept her in place in the immediate aftermath of the election disaster remain: there’s no obvious successor, let alone an agreed one.

This means that any future leadership contest will most likely be unpredictable, vicious and potentially ruinous for the party. Speak to a Conservative politician and they freely admit this – yet still their mind wanders. The calculation being made: could the alternative really be worse than the current state of drift?

There are many reasons to conclude that it would be. First, it seems near impossible to pick a caretaker prime minister. Even if the cabinet rallied around Jeremy Hunt – the health secretary who has managed to keep remainers and Brexiteers on side – it’s likely a leave candidate, such as Priti Patel, would announce their candidacy in the name of true Brexit. This would lead to more candidates and before you’d know it the playing field would be so wide you couldn’t fit them all in one TV studio. “If Theresa May can be prime minister, it does lower the standard,” remarks one Tory MP.

Voters would see a leadership contest at this point as an act of profound, and possibly unforgivable, self-indulgence.

Despite this, many Conservatives think it’s the only chance they have to turn the negotiations around. But even if a true Brexiteer were to lead the Conservative party – and the membership would lean to a Brexit candidate in any contest – there are some things no amount of charisma can solve. The party would still have no majority and would still require the support of the DUP to govern. It’s also not clear that the type of Brexit favoured by Jacob Rees-Mogg could get through parliament.

But changing leader, even with all the risks that it entails, is becoming more and more attractive to Tory MPs. As each day passes, they wonder whether they could actually make it to 2022 with May as their leader. While they may have agreed in theory to support her until the negotiations are over, the day-to-day reality is worse than most anticipated.

Everything hangs in the balance. Theresa May must prove she can lead; the government needs to start “fucking doing something”, one grumpy MP explains.

A look at this week’s grid suggests this isn’t about to happen. Unless it does soon, expect the number of MPs willing to take a chance on the unknown to swell to the 48 required to trigger a no-confidence vote. The longer Theresa May drifts, the more chance there is that Conservatives will conclude that things couldn’t be worse.

• Katy Balls is the Spectator’s political correspondent