Speak for England, Peaches! This must be the cry sent up by a nation searching for heroes it can believe in, as multi-hyphenate Peaches Geldof finds the law simply failing to keep pace with her self-elevation into a vigilante with a penchant for appearing in Hello! magazine.

But first, a recap: to the job description model-journalist-whatever, let us add the epithet justice dispenser, after Peaches took it upon herself to tweet the alleged names of the two women who allowed their babies to be horrifically sexually abused by the Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins. After some hours, and numerous people pointing out that she was effectively identifying the baby victims, it appears to have dawned on Peaches – or more likely her agent or lawyer – that perhaps the tweets ought to be deleted.

Alas, the realisation did not come quite quick enough for South Wales police, who confirmed they were investigating whether to prosecute her, with the attorney general's office reiterating that "victims of sexual offences have automatic lifetime anonymity and the publication of names or information which can lead to their being identified is a criminal offence". Having slept on this ingratitude for her efforts on Thursday night, Peaches has now offered a quarter-arsed apology for having been a quarter-wit. "The question of wether or not to give anonymity to criminals in cases like this will go on forever," intoned madam – and you may care to know there is a [sic] bag in the rear pocket of the seat in front of you. "However these women and Watkins will be gettings three meals a day, a double bed, cable TV etc – all funded by the tax payer alongside not being named apparently. It makes me sad. I deleted my tweets however and apologise for any offence caused."

In the circumstances, you do have to marvel at that mulishly self-regarding "for any offence caused" – the classic non-apology apology typically proffered by those with a belief in their own absolute probity, which is as unshakeable as it is misplaced. Peaches is sorry "for any offence caused", although it will presumably be some years before the victims are old enough to have her soz passed on to them – if indeed it came in any more personal form than her begrudgingly farted-out tweet. The etiquette in these cases of sublebrity digital criminality is also in its infancy, albeit metaphorically, and it is as yet unclear whether the standard response to accidentally threatening to ruin an already massively disadvantaged child's life is a basket of muffins, or a mid-range bouquet, or perhaps four complimentary tickets to Peaches' next trenchant appearance on This Morning.

So churlish is the tone of the "apology", in fact, that it is unclear whether a publicist has helped Peaches to even dimly understand that her actions reveal her to place a higher value on pitchfork-waving vengeance than she does on child protection, or to point out that, for all her pretensions to cultural grandeur, she remains not a million intellectual miles from the idiot who famously sprayed "paedo" on the door of a Newport paediatrician's home in 2000. That Peaches should have had every expensive educational advantage lavished upon her and still find herself unable to grasp her basic error is somewhere beyond unfortunate. Still, while she has been vocal in her distaste for those who allude to her own tragedy-beset childhood, it feels only kind to hazard that part of her radioactive silliness might be excused on the grounds of that difficult start.

Yet the unpalatable reality, of course, is that Peaches does speak for rather a lot of England. Anyone keen to indulge in a strictly non-scientific research project need only have visited the Daily Mail website's report on the outlawed Peaches tweets, to discover thousands upon thousands of commenters posting variants of "good on her", with a comparatively minuscule number of other commenters fighting the losing battle of trying to explain to these benighted folk what it was she had actually done.

As for Peaches, to this comparatively ancient correspondent's eye she seems a high-profile representative of an occasionally alien-seeming tribe – a generation who in many cases simply have no understanding of privacy, or of what was once perceived as its value, and who see some sort of continuum between living their own lives online and catastrophically compromising the lives of those they fancy deserve it in the same forum, when ethically there is none.

Peaches' renown has enabled her to take her generation's reflexive exhibitionism places mere civilians would be unable to go. Her Twitter timeline dutifully updates her 160,000 followers with near diurnal pictures of her children, and it is notable that she has consistently turned what might have been regarded as private family occasions into means of personally enriching herself. She flogged her wedding to Hello!, along with the news of her pregnancies, and of course "introduced" both her newborns to the world in lucrative photoshoots with the same publication.

Frankly, there's every chance she will find a way to turn even this latest incident into gold, and a forthcoming issue of Hello! will carry an interview of her that tap dances round "the misunderstanding everyone is talking about", while allowing her to pose up again with her children in exchange for a few quid. If so, we must doff our hats to the Britannia of idiocy, and observe that she should really be on coins – the unapologetic face of some apocalypse-baiting modern currency. Call it Twitcoins, and pile in today.

Twitter: @MarinaHyde