Vems has no chance of controlling an engine like that unfortuantely. The injector driving for common rail diesel is pretty complicated stuff (like gasoline DI only worse
) You'd need to keep the original ECU, and probably several other modules for immobiliser etc. Wouldn't be totally straightforward, but I'm sure its do-able. There seem to be plenty of diesel tuning specialists springing up that could surely help you understand what you need.
Insurance isn't going to be worse than any other one-off I wouldn't expect. At the end of the day its just an engine swap, and there's plenty of elises with 1.8T engines now, so its not entirely new.
Rich - some good advice there.
Now I'm going to stop as I'm really not interested in the dirty smelly things (Bah humbug....)