Trying to defend the indefensible...
Not at all. 'Mucking about' to my mind means something more than just a few snaps out of the flight deck window and leaving the camera in an unwise location.
It will be for others to determine whether there were SOPs in place to cover 'pilot off the flight deck' procedures and whether those were obeyed. There certainly were in VC10K days - but there wasn't anything like the level of automation reliability in our old coal-fired 4-jets that there is in the Voyager.