Rev Flowers: Sex, drugs and politics - do men handle power differently to women? History, though, is littered with men like the Rev Flowers or Mayor Ford for whom power isn't their only drug of choice. Usually it's sex which brings a man's career crashing down around his ears. Who can forget the former Welsh Secretary Ron Davies' "moment of madness" on Clapham Common? Or Tim Yeo's "love child" which skewered John Major's "back to basics" family values campaign. And then there were the allegations that Jeffrey Archer gave money to a prostitute - he won his libel case but was later jailed for perjury. In more recent years, the blokes seem to have been able to keep their jobs despite losing their trousers. Robin Cook remained as foreign secretary after leaving his wife for his mistress, and the mayor of London Boris Johnson's extramarital affairs seem only to have acted as political Viagra for his blossoming career. But why is it that women in power don't seem to suffer from the same kind of foibles? I'm not arguing that women are free from the kind of character imperfections which dog their male counterparts. It just seems that they're not subject to the same kinds of potentially career-ending moments of madness. Terri Apter, a psychologist at Cambridge university, told me: "It has a lot to do with risk-taking. You only have to look at the difference in insurance premiums on driving for example to see that men take more risks than women. This isn't just a hunch by the insurance industry - there's the evidence to prove it if you look at statistics about accidents and deaths on the roads involving men and women. If you accept the argument that men take more risks than women, the question is, why. I asked Ms Apter. There are evolutionary explanations for this, which have to do with women being in a position in which they feel that they have to care for others - that's their mindset. She also explained that men and women deal with power very differently. When men are in powerful positions they are saying 'I have this power and I see this as a stable thing', whereas a woman who might be in a comparable position might say 'I am here today, how do I guard it, how do I maintain it, how do I prove I am worthy of it.' All of that reminded me of Harriet Harman's remark that if the banking industry had been run by "Lehman Sisters" the global financial crisis wouldn't have happened. She was mocked at the time, but perhaps there was more truth to it than we all gave her credit for.