Deliberately awful?

There’s a particularly terrible column in the Guardian which is attacking comparethemarket.com’s meerkat ambassador Aleksandr Orlov as ‘racist’.

The author’s profile on the Guardian says:

Peter Jones works in the financial sector and lives in West London

Why would the Guardian take this dreadful comment piece, potentially damaging their credibility, from an ordinary guy? Why wouldn’t they put it in the letters page instead of CiF if they wanted to publish it? I think this could be a plant.

The article is very contentious and frankly utter bullshit, generating nearly 600 comments underneath it. It has bloggers, other newspapers and Twitter users linking to the piece. The original article has a link to comparethemarket.com, so this will have brought an awful lot of traffic to not only the Guardian’s website, but also to comparethemarket.com. It created a large response with people leaping to the defense of Aleksandr Orlov and ripping the article apart, thus making a vast amount of publicity for the company. Free publicity.

Could the Guardian have taken payment from comparethemeerkat.com to plant the article?