London: An article by Indian author and journalist Aatish Taseer about his alleged three-year relationship with Lady Gabriella Windsor, a member of the extended British royal family, has not been well received in London.

In an article in US magazine Vanity Fair, which now has an Indian-origin editor, Radhika Jones, in New York, Taseer said: "In a louche past life, I was almost a member of the British royal family. In the early 2000s, I dated Ella (short for Gabriella) Windsor, the daughter of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.

"Prince Michael was first cousin to the Queen and married to the unpopular Princess Michael, whom the British press had labelled 'Princess Pushy'. For three surreal years, Ella and I hung about Kensington Palace; we swam naked in the Queen's pool in Buckingham Palace; we did MDMA (a drug) in Windsor Castle; and we had scrapes with the British press."

Taseer, who met Gabriella in 2003 when she was a student in America and he had started working as a journalist, had drawn attention to his article in a tweet: "Brexit, royals and the good old bad days in London. My piece in this month's @VanityFair."

The article, Race and the Royals: An Outsider's View Inside Kensington Palace, has been provoked by the arrival of Meghan Markle, a mixed-race woman, on the royal scene.

Taseer's mother is Delhi journalist Tavleen Singh and his father was Pakistani politician Salman Taseer, who was Punjab governor from 2008 until his assassination in 2011.

In the article, Taseer takes pot shots at not only British society in general and the royal family in particular but also his own father.

"I grew up amid the depredations of socialist India - my father was a Pakistani businessman and politician who abandoned my mother when I was two, leaving her to support us through a career in journalism."

Taseer appears bitter his romance with Gabriella did not end in marriage - either her mother drew the line at an Asian son-in-law or his girlfriend in the end thought better of it.

"The British are perfectly happy to deal with people of colour who know their place; it is the 'uppity wog', or 'Paki' who arouses in them an animal hatred," he observes at one point.

That said, Taseer's account of life on the fringes of the royal family - Gabriella (who shares a birthday with the new Prince Louis of Cambridge) is 50th in line to the throne - is very well written and fascinating.

But its veracity has been called into question. On Friday, the London Evening Standard did a diary item on the article and basically accused Taseer of embroidering the truth.

The paper said: "His claims, in June's Vanity Fair, are unverified by the royal household, with Buckingham Palace offering no comment on behalf of Lady Gabriella at the time we went to press. But a friend of hers counters that they are fiction. 'Aatish is a novelist,' the source says, 'he has an active imagination'."

According to the Daily Mail, "there was stony silence from Buckingham Palace and a spokesman for the Michaels, who live at Kensington Palace, who said, 'There won't be any comment on the story'."

The newspaper recalled Taseer "once dressed up as a sexual health campaigner called Captain Condom".

Taseer more or less accuses the woman who might have been his mother-in-law of being a racist.

He reminds readers that she kept two black sheep named Venus and Serena, which just happened to be the names of the Williams sisters in tennis. She wore a Blackamoor brooch when first meeting Meghan.

Princess Michael, who is herself of Hungarian and German origin, "was of the firm belief that it was a bad idea for royalty to marry commoners", Taseer says.

She claimed not to be biased against non-white folk but Taseer is not convinced: "I would have liked to believe her, but I had my doubts. It was not that her father had allegedly been an SS officer, albeit a reluctant one; royals and Nazis go together like blini and caviar.

"It was that everyone above a certain age in Britain is at least a tiny bit racist.... I was one of the first natives of that former empire to be dating a member of the royal family."