"Part of the difficulty is that the parties have got locked into their positions and it's very hard to get them out of that.
"These are, firstly, the difficulty of identifying clearly the hand of a hostile state government in the subversive destabilising effects they bring to bear in the early stages of such a strategy," he said.
US technology companies routinely complain about the difficulty of obtaining visas for foreign software engineers.
In Javid's letter, dated 12 March, the minister voiced his concern about the risk that the revived censorship proposal would be used "otherwise than intended, not least given the difficulty of defining extremism, and the consequent likelihood of the government being seen to be interfering with freedom of speech without sufficient justification".
That seems a sensible approach, and for a woman whose life isn't being hugely compromised by some other overwhelming difficulty, it's probably a fairly easy measure to put into place.
Norovirus, the deepening difficulty of ensuring hospital rotas are fully staffed and the potential for bad weather producing a surge in patients with breathing trouble – the scenario the NHS fears worst – underlie why Hunt last week increased the extra money available to the service to cope with winter from £400m to £700m.
Mr Adams will sweep home in West Belfast, while Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein's education minister, will have little difficulty in Mid Ulster.
The governor of the Bank of England has explained the difficulty of currency unions; numerous academics - including Alex Salmond's former adviser - don't think a currency union would be agreed; and the recent survey by the British Chambers of Commerce showed business opinion is firmly in favour of keeping the UK and not in favour of a currency union.
Writing his memoir of his own journey, Douglass recalled that when one of his owners tried to prevent him from reading, "I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty – to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man".
The difficulty is that Westminster is now so toxic.
