You can never predict who’s going to go first, of course, but if you’d asked me last week which of my friends worried me most, the last person on my list would have been Anjool Malde.

Jools was the textbook someone-with-everything-going-for-him. He’d just been ranked the seventh top salesperson in his stockbroking sector in Europe. His club night business was doing great. He was perhaps the one person I knew who had fallback options if he’d lost his job. He was only 24, but he could have done anything.

Now, of course, I realise that the person with the glitzy life and the 1182 Facebook friends is the one to look out for. For someone who didn’t do failure, being escorted from his desk must have seemed like the end.

In a way, I’m not surprised it drove him to jump. Anjool’s drive was his defining characteristic – where others thought about things, he did them. At university, where we met, while the rest of us were playing grownups on student newspapers, he was working for the BBC; where we queued to get into clubs, he was running the guest list. After finals, I went to work in Borders; Jools not only took up a notoriously punishing job, he founded a club promotion business in his time off.

Flamboyant? Not really. He may look it in the photos – Boss suits, flanked by lissom girls – but in (unassuming) person he was anything but. ‘Party king Jools’ was his Sasha Fierce to Anjool’s softly spoken Beyonce Knowles.

He was ever ready to help others. He started a website giving banking advice. When a student interviewed him about British Asian identity, he apologised for not setting up a focus group.

I emailed him for help with a story once, unaware he was on holiday. Ten minutes later he’d replied – even though he was in Miami, it was 7am, and he hadn’t been to sleep yet.

But we don’t really care about kindness today, do we? That’s why, when I was invited to his birthday party – which should have been last night – I thought, well, I’m not clubby and it’s not like he’ll miss me.

And that’s why people who never knew him feel they have the right to spew grotesque bile about him online. “So what? It’s just a banker,” they say.

Anjool wasn’t ‘just another banker’, though – or ‘just another club promoter’, or ‘just another overachiever’. He was living reassurance that the nice guy can win. And he will be terribly missed.