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Britain’s Guardian had my respect and admiration for some time. Until Thursday morning. And all because of a travel blog.

It’s not because they started a travel blog, per se. It’s because they disrespected their readers so completely by publishing a poorly-written, self-indulgent case study in nepotism. And they featured it on the front page.

Here’s the editor’s intro to the new blog, giving a hint of the incredible insight that is to come, right out of the gate:

Meet Max Gogarty - 19, from north London, spends his money on food, booze and skinny jeans, writes for Skins in his spare time. He’s off to India and Thailand to have a good time, and you can join him in his weekly blog.

“Skinny jeans” ??! Wow. And the actual blog entry isn’t much better.

Take that, regular Guardian travel writers! You’ve been punked.

Normally I wouldn’t begrudge a 19-year old documenting his travels overseas. More power to him, and after all, we all act like idiots in our teens. But this is on the website of the Guardian. The freakin’ Guardian. The homepage of the Guardian.

So how did he get the gig? Some dismayed commenters on the site — among the over 500 comments left — cleverly deduced that Max is the offspring of Paul Gogarty, a semi-frequent contributor to the paper. And that Thailand, one of the stops on young Max’s itinerary, is a place the young lad in the “skinny jeans” has already been to, in 2002, as previously featured in Daddy’s writings.

Within minutes, the Wikipedia entry for “Nepotism” was edited to reflect young Max’s good fortune.

The comments on the thread are scathing. Deliciously scathing. In fact, staying on the Wikipedia theme, a Guardian reader noticed that Max had apparently described himself as a “top Guardian travel columnist” in the Wikipedia entry for his secondary school, a week before his blog was launched. Smooth.

The comments went crazy. British dry humor meets mob anger. Reason enough to welcome young Max and his skinny jeans to the blogosphere, solely for the comments. Really, they’re that funny. (Even if hundreds have been deleted by the Guardian’s editors. Too bad, really.)

Some samples:

a great lesson in ‘how travel journalism works’. in other words, via sperm and eggs

Or:

@Max
“I’m doing India on my own.”
You goddamn heroic bastard. How exactly are you planning on “doing” a billion people?

But for a complete disembowelment of the Guardian’s judgment, I turn it over to John Brownlee, whose gift for metaphoric hyperbole is matched only by his nose for a good internet meme. A sarcastic tour de force. Go read the whole thing.

Update: The Guardian sticks its head even further up its backside, by accusing the collective reader response of being a case of “mob rule.” Allusions to Cuba and Hitler abound, for good measure, but the paper refuses to back down from the position that their blog idea was anything but a bad one. Brownlee is on the case, again, and hits the nail on the head.