What was supposed to be a recovery moment for the Conservatives instead looks like a collective nervous breakdown. The Prime Minister has been forced to U-turn on her flagship tax plan. Her cabinet is in open rebellion. Tory party conference resembled a civil war. The latest polling suggests the party is heading for electoral extinction. And that’s after just four weeks of Liz Truss’s premiership.

‘I know we have had a series of crises but this one really feels like the worst yet,’ says one seasoned government aide. Some Truss supporters are showing signs of buyer’s remorse. ‘I didn’t know it would be this bad,’ says one MP who backed her. Others blame disruptors such as Michael Gove, who suggested he would not support Truss’s mini-Budget in a Commons vote without changes. Suella Braverman, in response, accused her former cabinet colleague of attempting a ‘coup’ against the leader.

In the small hours at the party’s annual conference, there were whispered conversations in bars: are there no other options? ‘We cannot oust another prime minister,’ says a member of the 2019 intake. ‘It would be madness.’ But others argue that, unless the polls change, keeping Truss in No. 10 would mean the Tories resign themselves to electoral defeat. Not even her backers talk about victory being probable. ‘There is a 35 per cent chance she wins the next election,’ says a key supporter.

There is hope in Downing Street that there will be a Lazarus-style resurrection: the markets will calm down and the energy crisis will ease, which will give Truss the chance to rebuild her standing with the public and the party. ‘The best-case scenario is we deliver an ambitious set of supply-side reforms that lay the ground work for growth, Labour get more scrutiny and we plough on,’ says a close ally of the Prime Minister.

Miracles aside, might the Tories change leader again? A party facing near-certain death is capable of anything. ‘It is very hard to remove a leader,’ says one party old hand. ‘There has to be a sense of desperation before you do it. Things would have to get worse.’ But it’s not impossible to imagine the situation deteriorating further or Truss’s control of her party simply collapsing, as eventually happened to Boris Johnson.

The idea of a caretaker prime minister is being floated – someone who would guide the country through the turmoil but then shuffle off. Names mentioned in passing include Kit Malthouse, the new Education Secretary, Grant Shapps, the axed transport secretary, and former chancellor Sajid Javid. ‘It would need to be someone who is not divisive in the party, which narrows the field,’ explains one MP.

The purpose of a caretaker leader would be to lose, but lose less badly than the polls suggest. Truss’s supporters dismiss the idea MPs could ever organise a coronation, let alone rally around an unknown candidate.

The 1922 Committee could change its rules to allow an MPs-only vote, which would not go to the membership. In theory the change could be made in a fortnight, perhaps sooner. But in 2005, Michael Howard had broad party support for a review of leadership election rules. Such a consensus today is hard to imagine.

If the party cannot go forward, what about going back? A Boris comeback is technically possible, and Johnson doesn’t hide his belief that his time in Downing Street was cut short. ‘I always thought a return was unlikely but not impossible,’ says a former colleague. ‘The likelihood is going up.’ Johnson’s allies are still active – arguing that he may have had a glass of prosecco at the wrong time but didn’t unleash anything like the current economic mayhem. Tory MPs in Red Wall seats have been spooked by the complaints they received from voters after they pushed him out.

Many of Johnson’s supporters backed Truss just to sink Rishi Sunak, whom they viewed as a traitor. It follows that they could switch support easily. Already Johnson’s cheerleader-in-chief Nadine Dorries appears to have withdrawn her support of Truss – ranting that she has ‘no mandate’ to row back on Johnson’s 2019 manifesto. Meanwhile, Conor Burns, another key Johnson ally, told a fringe event that the new International Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch is the ‘future of the party’ and gets the need to ‘move beyond Instagram posts about free trade agreements’.

However, plenty of MPs blame Johnson for the current situation. ‘Boris is not the prime minister for a crisis like this. He would just make it worse,’ says one who backed him in 2019.

Johnson sceptics in the party think the alternative is obvious: Sunak, currently the bookmakers’ favourite to replace Truss. As his allies do not tire of pointing out, he predicted much of the chaos: the surging mortgage rates, the crashing pound, the markets taking fright at unbalanced budgets.

The ‘Rishi by Christmas’ option would be popular among Tory MPs who placed him first in the last leadership ballot and still see him as the best bet for restoring the Tory reputation for economic competence. ‘He would need to pitch it as a government of national unity,’ says a party figure. Given how many of Sunak’s warnings came to pass, Truss’s supporters would find it much harder to deride him as a gloomster this time.

‘We need Rishi,’ says a senior Tory in a Blue Wall seat that up until recently had been viewed as very safe. Sunak could serve to reassure the markets and restore order to the government. Could he improve the party’s electoral prospects? ‘Things can snap back quite dramatically,’ says one supporter.

Are these outcomes possible? Yes, at a huge stretch. But they would involve desperate moves. To even talk about deposing a leader four weeks after her election is the sign of a party that has lost the ability to cohere. ‘The Tory party is ungovernable,’ says one government adviser. The only thing most MPs can really agree on is the need to avoid a snap election at any cost.