PHILIP Hammond condemned the Liberal Democrats' proposed alternative to a like-for-like replacement of Trident as the "worst of all worlds".

He joked that "Danny from Inverness" had proposed to fake a nuclear deterrent.

Mr Hammond said: "(The Lib Dems would) spend billions of pounds on replacement submarines, load them with dummy missiles, tie them up in a dockyard and pretend we have a nuclear deterrent.

"For the sake of saving a fraction of 1% of the defence budget, Lib Dem policy is to turn our tried and tested continuously-at-sea nuclear deterrent into a giant floating white elephant.

"The worst of all worlds: deterring no-one; saving next to nothing."