Theresa May’s premiership faces a critical series of tests this week, with Conservative MPs wondering whether she can finally draw a line under a disastrous few days in office.

Many Tory MPs appear dismayed by the prime minister’s lacklustre performance in the recent general election campaign and by her faltering response to the Grenfell Tower fire last week.

On top of that, the prime minister was subjected on Sunday to a thinly veiled attack from her chancellor, Philip Hammond, who lamented the way she and her aides had run an election campaign in which he was deliberately sidelined — and which ended up with the Conservatives losing their majority.

“It’s true that my role in the election campaign was not the one I would have liked it to be,” Mr Hammond said on The Andrew Marr Show. “I would have liked to have made much more of our economic record which I think is an excellent one.”

Even so, Mr Hammond reflected a broad consensus among Tory MPs that it would be too dangerous to mount a leadership challenge against Mrs May in the immediate future.

“What the country needs now is a period of calm while we get on with the job in hand,” he said. “We’ve got some very serious issues to address, including the Brexit negotiations just starting. Theresa is leading the government and I think the government needs to get on with its job.”

One minister said an immediate leadership contest would end in the Conservatives’ “self-annihilation” because there was no consensus on a replacement; and that Mrs May should only quit after seeing Brexit through to its conclusion.

However, another was more ambivalent about the prime minister’s prospects: “We have to see where we are after the party conference in October. If she hasn’t stabilised things by then and the country hasn’t shifted from its current angry mood, we may have to force a change.”

The prime minister’s immediate prospects may depend on how she performs on two challenges this week.

First, Mrs May needs to seal a pact between the Conservatives and Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party to provide her with a working Commons majority. Although an agreement is likely to be reached in the next two days, Treasury officials are concerned that the deal should not provide a blank cheque for central government to fund public services and investment in the province.

The second test will come with the Queen’s Speech on Wednesday, which outlines the new government’s legislative programme. Mrs May has already signalled her determination to press ahead with a demanding schedule of legislation to prepare the UK for Brexit by announcing that the parliamentary session will last two years, until after Britain’s planned departure from the EU in March 2019, rather than the normal one year.

Assuming that May seals a deal with the DUP, there should be no difficulty securing a Commons majority for the legislation. But the legislative programme required by Brexit is likely to be the most substantial and demanding in recent parliamentary history. MPs will watch closely to see how Mrs May performs in Wednesday’s debate.