It’s wrong, I think, to read this as a mistakenly archaic piece of English nationalism. It’s surely a species of disingenuous anti-reparations argument: “by your logic, France should be paying us reparations for the Norman Conquest”.
To the bad faith “So it shouldn’t have been covered at all?” brigade. You know that’s not the point. The point is that it shouldn’t have been covered in a wildly disproportionate manner, it shouldn’t have been subject to breaking news alerts, there shouldn’t have been scores of sneering columns and dirt digging, there shouldn’t have been TV discussions in which right wing rent-a-gobs were given free rein to spout thinly-veiled racism, it shouldn’t have gone on for weeks, and it shouldn’t have been ignored that there was a fallible human being at the centre of it, or that we’ve been here with others before. The sheer amount of coverage, and the tenor of much of it, was clearly not in the public interest and points to a profoundly broken media environment.