I think The Sunday Times really just likes trotting out articles like these, just to see readers’ reactions:

…I don’t want to be unfair. Many British women are great beauties. Charlotte Rampling, Kristin Scott Thomas and Jane Birkin, for instance, although of course they live in France. But there may be a grain of truth in the old French joke: what do you call a beautiful woman in London? Answer: a tourist…

Make sure you follow the comment trail.  One suspects that they will themselves eventually include a few “beauts”– while remembering also that, in real life, it is not just deemed increasingly inappropriate for generations’-long residents of these islands to offer a backhanded slap or two at anyone from the continent.  It is now “unacceptable“.

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UPDATE: Incidentally, that it is a spoof from a book is not the point. It is that The Times’ positioned it nebulously as a legitimate opinion article.  (One had to read very carefully to the end to discover it wasn’t.)  Newspapers have to be very careful about that sort of thing.