Pollsters have discovered why nearly all of them failed to predict that Tories would win the general election last year.

They did not pay sufficient attention to old people who are more likely than others to vote Conservative.

There has been a growth in grey power over recent years as many people live longer than ever before. For the first time in history there are more Britons over 65 than under 18.

When I started in journalism, hardly anyone lived to be 100 and reporters were invariably sent to interview them, usually an unrewarding task as most of the centenarians were gaga.

Now thousands reach that mark each year and the Queen, who herself turns 90 in April, must get writer’s cramp signing all the cards.

Here in Sussex we have been used to dealing with old people for longer than the rest of the country. They have tended to retire to the coast in large numbers, so much so that it became known as the Costa Geriatrica.

Towns such as Bexhill, where 40 per cent of the population is of pensionable age, had the highest concentration of old people in Europe.

Brighton would have gone the same way had it not been for the founding of two universities which brought thousands of youngsters to the resort. This has also benefited most of the other Sussex seaside towns to a lesser extent.

It is tempting to think of the elderly as being infirm as typified by the road sign which shows two bent figures huddled together. But nothing could be further from the truth for many of them.

Gyms are full of fit grey-haired athletes while ramblers’ clubs tend to attract old people. The University of the Third Age has several thousand members in Sussex and further education is flooded with them.

Amazing feats are being achieved by oldies. A man in his 70s took all 10 wickets in a cricket match and a centenarian in Greece completed a marathon.

The author Mary Wesley did not start writing books until she was over 70 while P G Wodehouse and Agatha Christie were busy writing stories until their last days.

Another popular misconception is that the elderly are all poor. They are not. Generally they have more spare cash than their younger counterparts.

Many of them leave substantial sums of money to their children thanks mainly to the high value of property they own.

As they tend to live so long, their children are often in their 50s or 60s before they receive the inheritance when their need for it is less urgent.

Realising this, many old folk give substantial sums to their children and grandchildren much earlier in life.

Rich or poor, most elderly people are entitled to receive the old age pension. Of all the benefits awarded in modern Britain, this is by far the biggest.

No one has yet dared suggest that the pension is not actually needed by many millions of old people and that the money would be better spent elsewhere.

But it will have to be considered eventually as the cost of providing state pensions becomes an impossible burden even bearing in mind the contribution we make towards them.

There has been talk of abandoning or means testing the winter fuel allowance which is awarded to pensioners or stopping free travel for old people on off-peak buses. But the cost of these benefits is a fraction of the sum spent on pensions.

It is possible that the pension problem will solve itself eventually as there are signs that the younger generation will not be as fit as the current crop of pensioners and will not live as long. But with advances in medical science, I wouldn’t bank on it.

As the pollsters discovered to their cost, old people are not always all that visible but they cannot be overlooked.

The Argus:  

Many people seem to have problems in spelling the name Trimingham.

Often they put two ms in the middle and sometimes they leave off the final m as if they have become bored.

But Trimingha is preferable to Chewing Gum, which is another odd version of my name, while someone once wrote to me as Tremenkspass.

The most extraordinary version of Trimingham has been Mingwha. Even if someone was bamboozled by my famously bad writing, this is an unlikely result. Surely no one in the world is called Mingwha.

But it occurred to me that by a bizarre coincidence, a Mr and Mrs Mingwha, living perhaps in an eastern European country, might one day receive a letter spelling their name as Trimingham.

I can picture them now guffawing to each other and saying in unison: “No one in the world could possibly have a name like that.”