Christmas is a time for tradition — bringing a tree into the house, midnight mass, giving gifts… and being repeatedly encouraged to cheat on your husband by a respected, small-c conservative national newspaper.

This is a tradition in the sense that 2019 is the second festive season in a row where British broadsheet newspaper the Daily Telegraph — which enjoys a strong legacy reputation as being the standard-bearer for the intelligent, conservative right in the United Kingdom — has bombarded its male social media followers with messages to encourage their wives to cheat on them as a Christmas present.

The December 2018 article Why men should give their wives a cheat pass this Christmas was ridiculed on social media when it was first published over a year ago as being so apparently totally out of character with the newspaper. Essentially an extended advertisement for a book whose author's quotes on freeing women from their husbands makes up the majority of the copy, the article also cites societal decline as proof of the central thesis of the work.