To the annals of hedonistic excess add a new entry. Right underneath “driving a car into a swimming pool” and “bathing in asses’ milk” file this shameless act of debauchery: “a soft drink and a dinner of fish and chips at a bar and restaurant in Fort William”.

Real last days of the Roman empire stuff, isn’t it? And yet there are those who begrudge Jeremy Corbyn even the small pleasures to be found on a Scottish walking holiday after enduring a long general election campaign and an even longer summer of rallies and hustings. The Labour leader’s aides were so worried about the reaction that they refused to use the H-word at all when talking to journalists, preferring to talk about a “long-standing private engagement”.

Then again, perhaps they were right to be cautious. “Jeremy has led the party off into the wilderness and then taken a hike in the Highlands,” lamented the reliably oppositional MP Simon Danczuk on hearing the news. A newspaper suggested that a few days by a loch equated to Corbyn “snubbing the Queen”. Twitter was full, as Twitter always is, of angry human wasps buzzing with condemnation.

Come on. Let the man have some bloody time off, people. If anyone understands the lure of stomping around rural Scotland for a bit, it’s the Queen: every year she spends the whole of August at Balmoral.

Yet the desire to moan about politicians’ holidays is almost irresistible. I know – I feel it myself. When it’s the middle of summer and you’re squashed on a boiling hot train, seeing a photograph of David Cameron in a wetsuit prods some deep recess of your brain that reliably squeals: get back to work, you neoprene-coated bastard.

But the prime minister is entitled to some time off, as was Corbyn last week, as are all our politicians. Let’s stop demanding they cut their holidays short for any national event upwards of a lorry full of milk overturning on the M5.

Politicians are almost never really needed home “to take control of the situation”. If they were, it would be a sign either that we were living in a dictatorship, or that everyone else in their administration was entirely incompetent – both of which would be more pressing concerns than a few gallons of soon-to-be-yoghurt pooling in the central reservation outside Droitwich.

Besides, if we respect politicians’ holidays, they might respect ours. Our culture has become absurdly puritan, looking on relaxation, fun and the desire not to work every single hour of the day as morally suspect. Look, here’s Jeremy Hunt arguing that tax credit cuts are an important “cultural signal” of who we are as a nation. “There’s a pretty difficult question that we have to answer,” he told an audience at Tory party conference. “Are we going to be a country which is prepared to work hard in the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard, in the way that Americans are prepared to work hard? And that is about creating a culture where work is at the heart of our success.”

It might be a difficult question, but it has an easy answer. No. Nuh-uh. Nope. No, we don’t want to work as hard as the United States, a country with no legally mandated holiday entitlement and no statutory maternity leave; a place where a quarter of workers receive no paid holiday from their employers at all; a place where billionaires high on Ayn Rand dream of creating private sweatshop islands in the sea. Nor as hard as China, where life expectancy is six years less than in Britain and workplace accidents kill 200 people a day.

If there is a problem with work in Britain, it’s not turning up to work; it’s what happens when we get there. Although unemployment remains impressively low, productivity is persistently disappointing. Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. Studies suggest that most workers cannot do more than eight hours of high-quality work in a single day. For mentally taxing or creative jobs, the figure is as low as six hours.

Of course, it suits Hunt to portray the desire not to work all the time as a moral failing, because he is currently trying to push through a new contract for junior doctors that extends “normal” working hours from 7am to 10pm. Any medics who object that this leaves little room for a life outside work are deemed to be laggards, just as unwilling to march forward to the glorious future as those who protest that exploitative zero-hours contracts force them to live in a perpetual work-ready limbo.

This narrative suits employers a hell of a lot more than it suits employees. It’s also a symptom of the infamous Westminster bubble. Is there any more obvious example of being a member of an elite than working in a job you’ve chosen, a job you’ve fought for, a job hundreds of other people would demonstrably love to have? Senior politicians have seen off rival candidates in their constituencies and fellow backbenchers in the scramble for office. As in many high-level occupations, the appearance of harried overwork then becomes a status symbol. Oh, I’d love to switch off my emails for a few days, such people sigh. But I’m just so extremely, terrifically important that everything would fall apart without me.

Let’s have a rest from the idea the highest human calling is to be a perfect cog in a capitalist machine

It’s a luxury to think of your daily grind like that. The idea that work should be “fulfilling” is a rarefied one: many people aspire only to a job that pays enough to live on, and which doesn’t actively make them unhappy. And in some professions, the potential mistakes caused by exhaustion or overwork are rather more serious than a rambling appearance on Newsnight or deciding it’s a brilliant wheeze to carve your policies on to a 9ft gravestone. Doctors worry, not unreasonably, that tiredness could kill.

So let’s have a rest – a rest from the idea that there’s something morally superior about overwork, and that the highest human calling is to be a perfect cog in a capitalist machine. Let’s celebrate holidays as a well-earned achievement.

If aspiration means anything, it should be the desire not just for a good job, but for a good life – maybe even one that includes a soft drink and a dinner of fish and chips in the Scottish drizzle once in a while.