Say what you like about Melania but she’s good at being married to Donald Trump

US First Lady Melania Trump addresses the Republican Convention during its second day from the Rose Garden of the White House.

In my job as a critic for The Sunday Times, I always apply one simple rule when judging something. I don’t ask: is it good? I ask: is it good for what it is? I may not like Love Island, for example, but I can see that as a dirty bad television programme it is great. By the same token, I may not like Melania Trump as an idea or an experience — she can’t smile, could never model, finds it difficult to relax in public and once wore a 25kg wedding dress that resembled sugary ectoplasm. But there’s one thing I have to admit that she’s brilliant at: the truly bizarre task of being Donald Trump’s wife.

Just one minute of the speech she gave at the White House on Tuesday was worth a billion dollars in positive publicity for the president, if only because she attempted to take out all his despicable trash in a swift half-hour while dressed as a sexy-air-hostess version of Hitler. She spoke about racial tensions and community and coming together as a nation, in a way that Trump himself never could or would. There is the added satisfaction that Melania has never sought or coveted her role, unlike, say, Michelle Obama or the grasping Hillary Clinton. I can never shake the feeling she has wept every day since Donald’s over-ambitious Apprentice promotional plan horrifyingly came to fruition and put a stop to her quiet life of wearing double Ralph Lauren and sending daily flowers to herself.

It feels strange that it should be a former lingerie model who exposes the first lady role as the undesirable and tokenistic little-wifey position it is. But if you want to know what we’re dealing with, she was accused of tearing out every single “historic” crab apple tree in the Rose Garden in preparation for her speech, originals of which were planted by Jackie Kennedy (the hashtag #RoseGardenMassacre trended). It now looks flat and steamrollered, like a Slovenian war memorial. It’s beyond kick-ass and kind of hilarious, up there with the over-the-top mathematical Christmas decoration systems she presents like a science project at the White House every year. She also ripped out Michelle’s bog, just FYI.

Did I recognise this ruthless big-dick energy when I interviewed her at Trump Tower in 2005? It was a month after her wedding and she was still trolling her way through a pile of 450 Tiffany presents. An extraordinarily pushy assistant seemed determined to get me to agree to copy approval. For hours she chased me around the gold trinkets in their mad Ferrero Rocher apartment with a contract (never signed). Melania struck me as someone who knew what she wanted out of every situation, and if it meant driving a nails-hard bargain, then so be it.

“People offer us diamonds to get the publicity,” she purred to me when I clocked her vast wedding ring. “So you make a good deal. That’s OK, but nothing for free.” In her world, saying “nothing for free” made her a person of the highest class and the utmost moral distinction.

Mrs Trump announces her "Be Best" children's initiative in 2018.

Mrs Trump wearing a jacket emblazoned with the words "I really don't care, do you?" following a visit with child migrants on the US-Mexico border.

Call me old-fashioned but I’ve begun to miss this sort of courtesy, reticence, quietness, manners, care and steely calm. Silence seems to be off the menu as a political tool. Politicians think chaos, protest, anger, noise, division and “change” are the way to win people over, when most voters want stability and - cripes - just nothing. No mask rage, no Twitter posturing, no Black Lives Matter restaurant vigilantism or outlawing full stops as oppressive.

Isn’t shyness an underrated virtue? It seems special to be treated to a speech by Melania, but I’ve lost count of the times Michelle has forced herself onto the podium, telling us how awful and disappointing and bigoted America is. Melania says just the opposite: becoming a citizen, she recalled on Tuesday, was one of the “proudest moments in my life”. Listening to her felt, unexpectedly, like a long drink from a cool well (Evian, obviously). It was all the more compelling for the fact that here we were coming across a person in politics who appears to want to get on with the job with no complaints.

Melania’s speech passed without much notice. It’s obvious she is of no use unless she can be dismissed - with the usual misogyny and xenophobia - as stupid, a trophy, surrendered, powerless, sad, unresolved or, as Bette Midler put it after hearing the speech, an “illegal alien”. It is easy to imagine that Melania is miserable, or frustrated, or ignored, or unhappy, and I’ll admit that hers is not a life that I envy. But when everyone in politics is losing their minds, she seemed to be keeping hers. And she’s got the hardest task of all: being Trump’s wife.

The Sunday Times