£50m prize offered by Vote Leave for Euro2016 predictions

Pro-Brexit campaigners have offered a £50 million prize to any voter who can correctly predict every result of the European football championships - in a novel bid to engage people with the debate.

Vote Leave hopes to use the contest to maximise the spread of its message by taking contact details and voting intentions from hundreds of thousands of armchair punters.

It was dismissed as a “con” by rivals pushing for a Remain vote after experts calculated the chances of scooping the jackpot were somewhere in the hundreds of trillions to one.

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Vote Leave - which has massively outstripped its opponents in terms of raking in private funds for the campaign - declined to say how much it had paid Lloyd’s of London to insure against someone defying the near-impossible odds.

Two donors have given cash specifically to fund the contest - which also includes a guaranteed £50,000 prize fund to be shared between those who go longest without one of their projections proving wrong.

Entrants - who have until 8pm on June 9 to sign up to make predictions via a website - must supply their telephone number, email address and home address to qualify for the prize.

They must also rate themselves on a scale of one to five as to whether they are more likely to back maintaining membership or divorce from Brussels.

The competition, open to all registered voters over the age of 18, is based on a similar competition run by US billionaire investor Warren Buffett involving the “March Madness” basketball in the US.