Gapper’s cyber travels go badly wrong

An extraordinary row has developed involving an English travel writer Paul Gogarty and his 19-year-old son Max. A Guardian Unlimited travel blog written by Max, a gap-year student who has just embarked on a two-month trip around India and Thailand, had to be shut down within its first 24 hours, after it was deluged with hundreds of vitriolic comments.

Max (pictured in his original blog), who described himself as living "on top of a hill in north London...spending any sort of money I earn on food and skinny jeans", drew the ire of surfers when they spotted that he had the same surname as the journalist Paul Gogarty, who occasionally writes for the Guardian's travel section.

Readers presumed Max - who also writes for teenage drama series Skins - was a privileged public school boy who had landed a highly-coveted blogging gig through his father's connections. A quick search through the Guardian website shows that Max has already travelled widely with his father - to Mexico's Bahia de Banderas, the Mediterranean resort of Jerba and Cyprus's Akamas peninsula – and it was assumed the trip to India was somehow being funded by the Guardian.

As the teenager landed in Mumbai last week, the internet hate mail was snowballing - attracting almost 500 comments before the site was closed, with scores of comments appearing on other message boards and social networking forums such as Facebook, as well as high-profile gossip sites like Holy Moly.

Over the weekend Gogarty Snr stepped into the fray, hitting back at the "tsunami of hate" directed at his son and accusing the bloggers of class hatred. "It's all so bitter and full of bile... Max is a talented and hard-working boy… He is not an attention seeker. He is just bright and 19 and middle-class - and that's a crime in Britain.”

As for the facts, Max attended a London comprehensive not a public school and paid for his own trip to India. Denying the charge of nepotism, Gogarty Snr, a freelance journalist, claimed he "hardly ever" writes for the Guardian. Gogarty went on: “[Max] has said to me that he doesn't like the media world now. He doesn't want to go into it any more.”

But if Max hopes to disappear into obscurity he may be disappointed. His name now appears on Wikipedia under the section on 'nepotism', alongside Kim Jong-il of North Korea and George W Bush.